


theft by finding

by varnes



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Indiana Jones AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-01
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-23 09:42:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 26,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16156496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/varnes/pseuds/varnes
Summary: Shane looks down at the medallion in his hand. He doesn’t know why he’s kept it, all these years. He doesn’t know why he’s kept it so close, always on hand. He should have sold it years and years ago, but he never quite managed to get around to it, and now here he is, in the burning building that is his whole life, with nothing else.Over the groaning of collapsing wood, he hears Ryan’s voice: “Shane? Shane? Shane!”He sounds breathless, like he’s been running. Shane kicks down the cracking front door and exits to the street, tucking the medallion into his back pocket. Ryan is standing right in front of the door, as if he had been about to run inside.“Tell you what, Ryan, you really know how to make an entrance,” he says, brushing ash off the front of his shirt and hoping that he’s managed to keep most of the bitterness out of his voice. “So was ruining my life once just like, not enough for you?”OR: don't lie to me, you wanted an Indiana Jones AU.





	1. i always knew someday you’d come walking back through my door

**Author's Note:**

> i made the villains not-nazis because i feel like there’s Enough About Nazis, right now, in the world. also, i didn’t make any of the villains people we know, because -- i mean they’re not nazis in this story but they’re analogous to nazis in the movie, and that feels like a dick move.
> 
> anyway i’m still l o s i n i t over ryndiana jones so have some Feelings About It.

It ends the way it starts: Shane waking up in a mussed bed, somewhat disoriented, reaching a hand out to grasp for someone who isn’t there. Sunlight filters in through the window. Shane is warm, and the sheets are pooled around his waist. He is twenty-three, his credit card is maxed out, and he is in Pokhara, Nepal. When he fell asleep, someone was beside him, but now the bed is empty. Three years ago, that absence had been named Sara, and she had left him with a note that said _you do you. xoxo._

This go around, the absence is named Ryan, and he’s left Shane with nothing at all.

\--

There are three rules at हिममानव:

  1.    No tourists.
  2.    No murder.
  3. If you _must_ murder, do it outside, and for _God’s_ sake clean up after yourself.



Shane had instituted the “no tourists” rule early, which even he acknowledges is somewhat hypocritical, given that he was born in Schaumburg, Illinois and insists on decorating the place like he still lives there. But he can’t stand the gaudy faux-Hindu garbage that most bar-adjacent places in the city put up. He’s not opposed to tourists in theory, just in _practice_ , because they’re loud and usually as white as him and they think that makes them friends, even though it doesn’t.

If they want to come to Kathmandu and spend their money and take photos of the cows wandering around, that’s fine. But Shane isn’t interested in being their tour guide or listening to them talk about how transformative Nepal is, and how the people have special spiritual insight into the beating heart of the universe, or whatever. Sounds great, Marion. Glad you’re having a nice time, Jones. Enjoy sunbathing and get out of Shane’s bar, because he’s in the middle of cheating an artifact dealer who is cheating an artifact trader who is cheating an artifact collector and you’re making everybody nervous.

Of course, sometimes those tourists are capital-C Customers, and in that case, Shane makes exceptions. Wealthy assholes from New York taking a vacation from being on the board of their country club to come to Nepal and buy stolen artifacts that they’ve been convinced have magical properties deserve to get cheated, and anyway, any sale that goes down in हिममानव gives a portion of its profits to हिममानव.

Magic isn’t real, artifacts aren’t haunted, and there’s no such thing as the supernatural, but if believing otherwise makes people open their wallets and give Shane their money, fine. They’re obsessed with Nepalese spiritualism but are happy to rob its heritage blind and put its cultural legacy as decoration in one of their fourteen summer cottages, so, fine. Shane is happy to let them make jokes about how hard it is to find a decent wine in this country and assure them that yes, Dhonu is a good friend of his, very spiritual, the most honest guy you’ll ever meet.

Provided, that is, that Dhonu is handing over the right percentage of his sale price. Shane charges 20%, which is an extraordinary amount, but he is soothing to customers and he turns a blind eye to occasional necessary violence and he doesn’t discriminate between garbage: artifact hunters, dealers, and buyers are all the same to him, which is to say, thieves.

But in a world of thieves the honest man starves, so Shane runs हिममानव under the policy that money is money and there is no such thing as a friends and family discount.

When he stops to think about it, he guesses it’s strange that this is where he ended up. He could go home, probably. There are plenty of artifact hunters in the U.S. looking to broker the artifacts they’ve stolen, peddling them as holding special powers that don’t exist.

There had been a time when Shane thought it was okay, to take what wasn’t yours, to claim it if you found it. He’d thought it might be fine, if you sold it to a museum, if you put it somewhere safe for its own good.

But half a lifetime ago, he woke up in a hotel room alone, left with only a single bauble from their entire haul and enough money to get back to Kathmandu and no further, and he realized theft by finding still was theft. Theft by finding still took something from its own context and dropped it in the middle of Nepal with nothing but the clothes on its back and a vague recollection of the address for an old antiquities professor from Chicago, who’d taken one look at him and said on a sigh, “Jesus _Christ_ , this is unforgivable. You’ve been in _public_ like this?” before letting him in.

Ex-Professor Yang (“I prefer _doctor_ , it’s called a _doctor_ ate”) lived in and ran a high-end hotel, mostly so that he could lounge out by the pool in a bathrobe while he does paperwork, as far as Shane has ever been able to tell. He’d made Shane his front of house, to cater to the tourists looking for a familiar face to speak in English to them, although everyone who worked there spoke significantly better English than Shane spoke Nepalese. He’s gotten better over the years. He knows he still has a pretty terrible accent, but his grammar is good, and his vocabulary ever-growing. He’d worked his way up at Professor Yang’s until he realized that he _liked_ it, running a place, being the boss.

And he liked doing it in Nepal, where he was an outsider for obvious reasons and not internal ones, and where the laws of the land were strange and somewhat arbitrarily enforced and obeyed. Nepal, like Shane, followed only the rules that didn’t bother it, and even then it was dodgy.

So, when he’d saved enough, he opened his own little place. He could have done it sooner if he’d been willing to part with the old artifact Ryan had left behind, a big gold medallion that he was sure he could get some money for if he ever got around to selling it; but he had grown kind of fond of the shiny, gaudy thing. It was ungainly and pointless, but pretty, just like that time in his life had been, and it served to remind him that you must carry the things you steal — gold, money, love, time. They all have weight.

He called the bar हिममानव. It means, roughly, Bigfoot, which Ryan used always to call him, and this way it would remind him never to be that stupid again.

Professor Yang asked about Ryan exactly once, saw Shane’s face, and changed the subject. Professor Yang was an asshole but a kind one, and he must have known by whatever Shane’s eyebrows did that things had turned sour between the two boys who had sat next to one another in his class, who had laughed their way through presentations on whether or not artifacts were imbued with power, who had insisted on being in groups together despite disagreeing on almost every point.

“You’re a real dumb fuck,” Professor Yang had said to him, before abruptly returning to the U.S. on ‘urgent business,’ which Shane suspected meant he’d been caught doing something in Nepal that even the Nepalese police couldn’t turn a blind eye to. He’d left with assurances that Shane could live in the hotel as long as he wanted, but Shane had instead moved into the little apartment above हिममानव.

Or perhaps it is more honest to say he moved into the attic space above हिममानव and put a plant in the window, thereby making it an apartment. He went back to Professor Yang’s room to have his laundry done and to occasionally soak in his criminally luxurious bath, but other than nosily rifling through the few meager belongings he’d left, there wasn’t much for him there.

And things were ... fine. Good, even.

Shane had his bar, he made good money in the life he’d accidentally made as the city’s preferred black market artifact broker, and — and that was fine. It was all perfectly fine.

Shane is thirty-four: older and wiser and tireder than he’d been at twenty-two, fresh out of university and so sure of what the world held. He doesn’t blame his young self for getting swept up in it, the excitement of old and beautiful things, the glittering way that artifacts and Ryan made him feel. Shane has always loved history, has always wanted to touch it with his hands; of course he hadn't been able to resist Ryan, wide-eyed and bright-smiled and offering it to him.

 _Are you ready to have your mind blown, Shane?_ he had asked, rolling on the balls of his feet, already knowing the answer, and Shane was twenty, freshly broken up with, and a midwestern farmboy down to roots that had never been quite convinced to stick in the dirt. Shane had been a skeptic of the magic of artifacts but a believer in the magic of Ryan. He’d thought the future was laid out and obvious before him: the two of them, running through dig sites shouting rude and manic things at each other, dodging artifact hunters more hungry for gold than historical preservation. They were going to be the good guys, the heroes, the protectors of history, him and Ryan.

He’d said, laughing, _We’ll see._

And he supposes they had; it just hadn’t been the picture he’d been expecting.

\--

“Shane,” Dhonu says, his voice a wheedle as he leans over the bar, “please, my friend. I am begging you. For the sake of our long history.”

Shane raises his eyebrows. “First of all, we aren’t friends,” he says. “What we are is business acquaintances. And for the sake of our mediocre business relationship, my answer is still no. Perhaps it’s an even firmer no, just to re-establish clear boundaries.”

“But what is the harm?” Dhonu cries, spreading his arms wide. “You overvalue a tiny trinket, only a little, and everyone wins. They get a fancier bauble, I get more money, _you_ get more money. We are all happy.”

Shane picks up the piece that Dhonu has brought him, an elephant statuette that he claims comes from somewhere in the mountains. Shane is pretty sure it comes from somewhere in a factory. _Maybe_ it was found near to a site — it’s accurate, at least, to the time period Dhonu is claiming it’s from — but _definitely_ it isn’t from an important tomb, and even if it was, it wouldn’t have the supernatural powers Dhonu is claiming.

“You want me to tell them that I’ve seen this piece of garbage magically cure tuberculosis,” he points out flatly. “That’s not overvaluing a trinket, that’s snake oil sales.”

Dhonu frowns. “I do not know this phrase,” he says. “In America, they sell oil from snakes?”

“No. That’s the point. Your cousin probably made this in his kitchen, and unless your cousin is the herald of the new gods, which I deeply suspect he isn’t because I have met Batsa and he's an idiot, it’s not going to help anybody’s sick aunt stop coughing up blood.” He tosses the statuette back onto the bar. “I’ll help you rip off some rich assholes but I draw the line at the medically infirm.”

Dhonu shakes his head with a long sigh, tucking the statuette back into his pocket. “You don’t know it cannot help them,” he scolds. “Sometimes belief imbues a thing with the very power they bought it seeking.”

“Hmmm,” Shane says dubiously. “And _sometimes_ every word out of your mouth is bullshit.”

“Ahhhhhh, but only sometimes,” Dhonu agrees, grinning. He pushes his empty glass towards Shane and Shane fills it with the customary Gorka beer, lifting his own in salute before drinking. He isn’t drunk; it’s too early in the night to be drunk, and anyway he doesn’t like to get too wasted while he’s at work. There’s too much opportunity for Drunk Shane to make bad choices and agree to things that Sober Shane will be disappointed in him for, like the time he accidentally admitted to having a degree in archaeology and immediately all his customers tried to get him to sign off authenticating the trinkets they were trying to sell.

He points a finger at Dhonu, lifting a tray with drink orders and resting it against his hip bone. “You bring them into my bar and they ask me about the value, I’m going to be honest,” he warns him, before ducking under the bar door and shouldering his way through the packed patrons to deliver the drinks.

It is a busy night -- weekends often are, high in local customers and low in illegal dealings. Most of those take place during the week, because it’s less crowded and you’re less likely to spot someone who’s angry with you. Shane is accepting shots of raksi from local expats, but not really drinking them; it is an old trick that Professor Yang had taught him, to swill the shot in his mouth and then spit it into the “chaser” beer bottle. He’s actually something of a lightweight, really, because he hates being drunk and doesn’t get that way very often.

Drunk Shane is an emotional Shane, and an emotional Shane is a dangerous and stupid Shane, so he doesn’t swallow the shots and instead only pretends to list to the side alongside everybody else.

“The himamānava himself drinks with us tonight!” cries one of them, who Shane has begun seeing a lot and whose friends call him Mutt, a preposterous way to let people address you. “The American himamānava!”

“He always drinks with whomsoever is buying,” Shane says dryly, clinking shot glasses and waiting for Mutt to toss his drunkenly back before just putting his own drolly back on the table. “It’s just about time to settle up, boys. Who’s paying?”

“I’m always paying,” Mutt laments.

“Such is the tragedy of success,” Shane agrees, and holds out his hand expectantly.

Mutt makes a face. “Dhonu, the American himamānava is a miser.”

“This is because you call him the wrong name,” Dhonu scolds, coming up behind Shane and clapping a hand to his shoulder, their fight forgiven. “The Americans have their own name for the himamānava.”

“What?”

“Bigfoot,” says Shane.

Behind him, he hears the wheeze of a laugh he hasn’t heard in years. A laugh he thought he’d never hear again—that he’d _hoped_ he’d never hear again.

He freezes with his hand around Mutt’s money.

“So it wasn’t just me who recognized your true species,” Ryan’s voice says. It’s light, teasing, familiar, like nothing has changed; like he hadn’t disappeared in the middle of the night, taking the artifacts they’d barely escaped a temple with; like he hadn’t mortally wounded Shane’s heart in the process.

His hand tightens around the cash and the shot glass he hasn’t yet let go of.

“Don’t you know why we call him the himamānava?” Dhonu asks cheerfully. “Ah, you cannot read Nepalese, then. It is because — ”

Shane doesn’t want Ryan to hear, because when he finds out he will understand, will know the terrible truth of how Shane had felt about him, how much Shane had felt in contrast to how easily he was thrown away. In a desperate pitch to cut Dhonu off, he spins around and throws his shot glass at Ryan’s head.

Ryan has always had quick reflexes: he ducks, all 5’10” of him hitting the floor. He’s wearing the same stupid getup he used to, those terrible brown cargo pants and a sandy-looking button-down with its sleeves rolled to his elbows. His hairline has receded, a little. It still takes Shane’s breath away, how good he looks.

“Out,” Shane says. “Out, out, out.”

Ryan is gazing up at him from the floor, jaw loose with surprise.

“Me?” Dhonu asks.

“Everyone,” Shane says firmly. He shovels Mutt’s cash into his pocket and climbs into one of the nearby tables, not looking at Ryan, who has materialized out of nowhere, the only ghost that Shane believes in.

He cups his hands around his mouth and bellows in Nepalese: “CLOSING TIME. BRING YOUR MONEY TO THE TILL.”

He keeps not looking at Ryan as he goes back to the bar, nor as he collects his earnings, nor as he ushers out the crowd.

“But what have I done? I have a sale!” Dhonu whines.

“Sell somewhere else,” Shane orders him firmly.

Ryan is hanging back. Without turning his head, Shane says curtly, “You too. The night is over.”

“Shane,” Ryan says, voice quiet. “Okay — I know that I — maybe there is some explaining I need to — ”

Shane slams the till shut, loud enough to echo in the empty bar. Dhonu’s eyes flick with interest between them. “I said everybody out, and that means everybody,” Shane insists. He has not looked up. He feels frozen, like he can’t move his head, like if he looks at Ryan, everything he has built will crumble, the walls of हिममानव falling like cards around him.

It’s been eleven years. Shane has built himself a life that is fine. He is thirty-four, for God’s sake; Ryan is just someone he loved when he was too young to know better. He’s an old wound, one that has scarred over as it healed.

Shane knows he is not playing it cool, that his reaction is an obvious _reaction,_ but he can’t bring himself to do anything else. He can’t move his facial muscles, can barely move his hands.

“This is _important_ ,” Ryan insists, voice cracking the way it used to do when he was anxious.

Shane finally looks up. He meets Ryan’s eyes and takes him in, the whole of him, one last look before he never does again. “Not to me,” he says. “Dhonu, please escort this man out.”

“ _This man_?” Ryan repeats, appalled. “Shane, come on, we were — ” he stutters, looking quickly at Dhonu and then away, “— friends.”

“We were business acquaintances,” Shane dismisses. “Dhonu?”

“You best come,” Dhonu stage-whispers. “I too am a business acquaintance. The boundaries are really quite firm.”

He leads Ryan out by the arm. Shane doesn’t watch them go; he counts his money.

—

Obviously he doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t even try. He stays awake, staring at the ceiling for a long time, and then goes downstairs to हिममानव to mindlessly clean down spotless tables until the sun rises, if it does, if the entire world hasn’t ended.

It’s meditative, scrubbing in circles while he thinks, replaying it over and over, the wheeze of Ryan’s laugh and the fundamental sameness of him, even all these years later.

 _Do I look the same to him?_ Shane wonders punishingly, looking at his own reflection in the mirror. He’s harder, he knows; looks a little more world-weary. He carries the eleven years of Nepalese living, of running the bar and breaking up fights and getting into a few of his own. His eyes are more wrinkled than they were, his posture more defensive, maybe. But these things are just part of the wound of human life: Ryan must carry them, too, in his own way.

But why has he carried them _here_ , now, after all this stupid time? Shane has, despite himself, been kept abreast of Ryan’s burgeoning career, his prestige as the youngest Ph.D in the history of UCLA’s Archaeological Department, his growing reputation as an obtainer of artifacts, a discoverer and preserver of history, launched by one groundbreaking trip to Nepal eleven years ago, and the discovery of a golden idol the world had thought was lost.

 _We’ll find it together_ , Ryan had said. _I’ve done the research and I have a theory about where it is._

Ryan always had theories and Shane always went along with them, even when he didn’t believe, even when he knew it was bullshit, but this time Ryan had been right. This time, this temple, this artifact, and they were going to bring it back to Chicago together. It was going to make both of their careers.

It had made _Ryan’s_ career, certainly, when he took it in the middle of the night and disappeared, leaving Shane only with the medallion that he’d — what, forgotten? Given to Shane as a consolation prize?

He got the glory. He got the job. He got everything he wanted: Doctor Ryan Bergara, professor of archaeology, expert on the occult, and — how does he phrase it? — obtainer of rare antiquities.

So why did he come _back_?

His mind goes in circles along with the rag in his hand, for hours and hours and hours, and this is the only reason Shane is at हिममानव when the windows shatter open, people in masks pouring in through the windows. He ducks instinctively under the bar, some almost-forgotten instinct taking hold of him,  and waits as they walk noisily through the building, loud enough to wake him, if he’d been sleeping.

There is a gun taped beneath the counter in case of deals gone bad, and he grabs it, snapping the safety off with his thumb. But he doesn’t start shooting; that was always Ryan’s MO, diving into whatever chaos he could find, but Shane has always been more strategic.

They are looking for something, obviously — they’re not speaking Nepalese, but something closer to Tibetan, Shane thinks; maybe Tamil? Hindi? It clearly isn’t their native language. Shane would pin them as American, given their flat vowels and sharp-tongued T sounds.

They’re not being quiet. Shane thinks maybe they don’t know he lives upstairs, or if they do they don’t care about theoretically waking him.

“... Bergara,” a woman says, amidst a smattering of indecipherable words.

 _Of course_ , Shane thinks. Ryan is back in Nepal for the same reason that Ryan is ever anywhere: to take something that doesn’t belong to him and leave trouble in its place. And now he’s brought that trouble here, to Shane.

To Shane’s _bar_.

In a fit of sudden pique, Shane decides not to stay under the bar any more. This is _his_ place, and they’re breaking all his glasses. Shane had _paid_ for those. It’s rude, is what it is, and Shane’s not just going to sit here and let them do it.

He stands, aiming his gun for the American woman, who he assumes is in charge based on the way she’s leaning against a table and not being helpful while her minions run around fucking up Shane’s admittedly substandard furniture.

“Hey,” he barks, flicking his wrist at the American woman. Her has long, dark hair and deep-set eyes, half-shielded by a bright red wide-brimmed hat. “All due respect here, but what kind of fucking game are you playing?”

She looks surprised, eyebrows rising, and the minions scramble for their guns around him. “Shane Madej,” she says, and Shane was right, she’s definitely American. Californian, maybe. “As I live and breathe.”

“Do I know you?” Shane asks. “Are we friends? Because I have to tell you, breaking into a man’s place of business and wrecking his decor is decidedly unfriendly behavior.”

She laughs, apparently unconcerned by Shane’s presence or by being caught. “We haven’t formally met,” she admits, “but I recognize that face from the photos. Such a promising student. Accepted, I believe, to several prestigious graduate programs in archaeology. One of the field’s brightest stars, until ...” She makes a gesture that is presumably meant to indicate Shane’s abrupt departure from academia.

“I’m not hiding,” Shane points out. “I came to Nepal. I liked Nepal. I stayed in Nepal. It’s not that big a mystery, and even if it where, it’s no reason to turn my bar into the a set piece from the Book of Revelations. Also — what photos?”

She holds up two fingers, a Polaroid pinned between them. Even from a distance, Shane knows what it is: him and Ryan, smiling in front of a sunbeam on the UChicago campus in Hyde Park. They were holding their degrees in front of their chests, dressed in graduation gowns. There’s no reason for her to have it, unless —

_Ryan._

“Where did you get that?” he asks, his throat tightening.

She shrugs. “You came to Nepal together, no?” she asks. “Looking for that — idol, I believe. A big find, at the time. Perhaps you found some other things, too. Perhaps you found something that I would like, and Mr. Bergara did not have.”

“Doctor Bergara, actually,” Shane corrects without thinking, and then immediately hates himself. “Look, if you’re looking for artifacts, you came to the wrong place, lady. I won’t deny that sometimes sales occur in this establishment, but I’m not a dealer and I never have been. Whatever you’re looking for, I don’t have it.”

“Let us nevertheless explore the possibility that you might,” she invites him with what reads as genuine warmth. Then again, there are seven or eight guns trained on Shane, so maybe he’s not in the best headspace to read the room. “It is about yea big,” she forms a circle by touching the tips of her pointer fingers and thumbs together, “very shiny, with the head of the bird in the center and a gorgeous ruby eye.”

 _Well, shit_ , Shane thinks. _I do have it._

“Sounds pretty,” he says. “And if I had it, I would be delighted to give it to you, if for no other reason than to get you out of my bar. But I don’t. Everything we found on that trip, Ryan took. Check with whatever museum he brought the idol to.”

The woman tuts, clearly disappointed in him, and shakes her head. “I was hoping you would be more cooperative than Mr. Bergara,” she tells him on a sigh.

Shane hears the click of a safety going off. He corrects, “ _Doctor_ Bergara,” swings his arm toward one of the minions, and pulls the trigger.

—

He’d forgotten how loud gunfire could be.

When it’s over, the American woman and her four remaining minions vanished into the night, Shane surveys the ruin of the building. The wooden support beams of हिममानव are groaning as fire makes its way up them, toward Shane’s apartment, toward everything he owns, everything he’s managed to cobble together in the wreckage of the last decade; all his travel documents, all the photographs his mother sent over the years, all his shirts.

He looks down at the medallion in his hand. He doesn’t know why he’s kept it, all these years. He doesn’t know why he’s kept it so _close_ , always on hand, in the space beneath the money drawer in the till. He should have sold it years and years ago, but he never quite managed to get around to it, and now here he is, in the burning building that is his whole life, with nothing else.

Over the groaning of collapsing wood, he hears Ryan’s voice: “Shane? Shane? Shane! You’re too smart for — come on, big guy, you’ve got to be around here somewhere.”

He sounds breathless, like he’s been running. Shane supposes he’s not dead, then; however they got the photo, it wasn’t by killing Ryan. He takes a second to consider the non-zero chance that his name and photo weren’t stolen but given. He debates crawling out one of the windows. Let Ryan wonder if Shane has been taken, or murdered, the way he had initially thought that surely the only reason Ryan would go was if he had been forced.

But he is more interested in understanding what the fuck is going on than he is in being petty, so he kicks down the cracking front door and exits to the street, tucking the medallion into his back pocket.

Ryan is standing right in front of the door, as if he had been about to run inside.

“Tell you what, Ryan, you really know how to make an entrance,” Shane says, brushing ash off the front of his shirt and hoping that he’s managed to keep most of the bitterness out of his voice. “So was ruining my life once just like, not enough for you?”

The stark relief in Ryan’s face is obvious and overwhelming, like he hasn’t even heard Shane’s words. He rushes over and drags Shane further into the street and away from the flames, patting him down as if to ensure that he is uninjured. “You’re all right?” he asks. “You’re really all right? You aren’t — there isn’t anything — ”

“I’m fine,” Shane tells him, drawing away from the touch of his hands. “Ryan, stop.”

Something in his voice must make it through the fog of Ryan’s panic, because he draws his hands quickly away, raising them as if in surrender. “Sorry, right, sorry, I just — God, I saw the building and I thought — I thought something had _happened_ to you, holy shit.”

Shane turns around to look at the building. It’s going to collapse soon. They probably aren’t standing far enough away. “Something _did_ happen to me, Ryan,” he says flatly. The building groans in agreement. Somewhere in the distance, Shane can hear shouting. He feels oddly disconnected from everything that’s happening to him. “Jesus Christ, that’s my whole — that’s my fucking _life_ , man.”

He spins back to face Ryan, glaring, suddenly so angry he doesn’t know where to put it all, how to direct it in a way that won’t end with him having to hide a body. “What the fuck are you even _doing_ here?” he asks. “Why did you give them my name and my picture?”

Ryan blinks at him. “What? I didn’t — Shane, how could you think that I ... I didn’t _mean_ for this to happen. I tried to warn you earlier, but you didn’t let — wait, did they get the medallion?”

“No,” Shane says, and then, just to be an asshole, “I don’t have it. I sold it years ago when I was out of cash and really craving a cheese sandwich.”

He shoulders past Ryan and starts walking. It’s not far to Professor Yang’s hotel; Shane just wants to shower, and sleep, and forget about this day, forget about Ryan, forget about everything.

He believes him, is the thing. The stupid, young, never-learned thing is that Shane knows Ryan lies and he probably believes him anyway.

He’ll figure out what to do in the morning, but for tonight he wants to get very, very, very, very drunk. He’s pretty sure Professor Yang has some raksi hidden in one of the closets.

“A _cheese sandwich_? That was — dude, that medallion was made out of gold!”

“Yeah, well, it’s really fucking hard to get good cheese in this country, Ryan, and as the proprietor of a small business I had to be responsible with my liquid assets.”

Ryan trails after him, not speaking at first, which is probably for the best, since the sound of his voice might make Shane strangle him. Eventually it becomes clear that Ryan is planning to follow him all the way back to the hotel, not willing to let Shane out of his sight. “Yeah, of course,” Ryan says, voice an octave too high. “I, uh, didn’t expect you to like, keep it or anything — ”

“Yeah? Good,” Shane interrupts, whirling on him. “Because I didn’t. Guess I didn’t feel like lugging around some stupid trinket you _forgot_.”

“I didn’t _forget it_ ,” Ryan says, sounding appalled. “I — it was supposed to be ... ” He trails off, looking sheepish.

“What?” Shane asks as they come to the front of the hotel and Shane slams his way through the front door, not bothering to wave at the hostess. Ryan trails him dutifully, all the way up to the room. “What was it _supposed to be_ , Ryan?”

He flicks on a light and meets Ryan’s eyes, waiting, daring him to say it. Daring him to say _a goodbye_.

Ryan deflates. “Nevermind,” he deflects. “I didn’t know what it was at the time.”

“And what is it?”

“A map,” Ryan tells him. His eyes gleam, the exact same spark lighting them up that Shane remembers, his voice airy with excitement. “Shane, it’s a map to the Holy Grail.”

Shane blinks. “The holy grail of what?”

“No,” Ryan explains, laughing a little, “I mean the actual, literal Holy Grail. Like from the Bible.”

Shane makes a face and moves deeper into the hotel room, letting Ryan come in after him. He digs into the closet for the raksi he knows is there and once he finds it, takes a long swig from the bottle. It burns going down, sweet like tequila but with an earthier flavor because this was made for Professor Yang by a local in her backyard.

He doesn’t offer any to Ryan, just carries it by the neck to the bed as he drops heavily onto it.

Ryan is watching him, clearly waiting for a response, so Shane says: “Neat.”

Ryan gapes at him, arms dropping from being cross his chest to dangle uselessly at his side. “ _Neat_?” he repeats. “Dude, this is — Shane, you _love_ religious relics, you were always trying to get me to track down more of them, you said they were a pieces of globally significant cultural heritage.”

“Did I?” Shane muses peaceably. The raksi hasn’t hit him yet, but it is a nice burn in his belly nevertheless. “Hm. I guess that sounds like something I would say.”

Ryan is looking at him somewhat helplessly, like he’s never seen him before. _Good_ , Shane thinks. Because he hasn’t, not this version of Shane, not this person Shane has grown into. “I ... look, dude — the people who did this, they’re ... it’s bad shit, okay? It’s really really bad shit. Do you remember who you sold the medallion to? We have to find it before they do. It’s important. Not just to me, but like, _cosmically._ ”

“So you’re still on _that_ bullshit, huh,” Shane deduces, shaking his hair out and tugging off his boots, scooting to the edge of the bed. Ryan is still hovering awkwardly by the door. “Got a doctorate and everything, and you’re still telling ghost stories.”

“It’s not a _ghost story_.”

“Everything out of your fucking mouth is a ghost story,” Shane snaps, hauling himself to his feet and yanking his shirt over his head.

Ryan flinches, stung, and takes a step back. “ _Shane_ ,” he says, eyes flicking down to Shane’s bare chest and then back up to his eyes. Shane turns his back on him, going into the bathroom and turning on the faucet to fill the tub. Ryan follows him. “Come on, man. Don’t — I know you’re mad at me, and you have every right to be mad at me, but this is _bigger_ than that, okay? I don’t have time to explain, but it’s like — it’s fucking — _earth-shatteringly big_ , dude. We can’t let the wrong people — ”

“How big?” Shane interrupts.

Ryan blinks. “Like — biblical,” he says. “Heaven and hell kind of stuff.”

Shane rolls his eyes, shoving his hand through his hair. “Spooky,” he says, “but I don’t give a shit about the fake magic bullshit. I’m talking about the _money_ , Ryan. How much cash is at stake, here? Millions? _Billions_? I’ll bet the Catholic Church would open its wallet for the Grail, if it’s real.”

Ryan frowns at him. “Dude, what is _with_ you?” he asks, folding his arms across his chest. He leans against the doorframe and studiously looks everywhere but at Shane as he pulls off his pants and lowers himself slowly into the tub as it fills. He’s too damn long for it -- he has to fold up at the knees. “You care about preservation. You’re a fucking _history nerd_.”

“First of all, you don’t _know me_ anymore, and secondly, that was before you swanned in and got my goddamn livelihood burned to the ground,” Shane reminds him flatly, leaning his head against the lip of the tub and closing his eyes. Like this, he can almost pretend Ryan is someone else, some new stranger who has ruined his life rather than just a repeat of the first time.

“Okay, _I_ didn’t burn your bar down,” Ryan snaps back. Shane opens his eyes to turn and glare at him, and catches Ryan staring. He looks away, cheeks heating. “I’m sorry it happened but I didn’t _tell them_ to come here, I — fuck, I didn’t tell _anyone_ that you had the goddamn thing. I don’t even know how they — ”

“Stop monologuing and give me the price tag, Ryan,” Shane interrupts.

“I don’t know! A lot. A fucking lot, dude. But it doesn’t matter, because you don’t have the medallion and without the medallion we can’t find the Grail.”

“If we find it,” Shane says, “we’ll split it. Fifty-fifty.”

“Split what?”

“The fucking _money_ , you absolutely preposterous idiot.”

Ryan is quiet. Shane watches some complex emotion cross his face. “It’s not — Shane, this isn’t about the money, man, come on.”

“It is for me,” Shane tells him, because he knows it’s upsetting Ryan to hear. He’s perversely satisfied, to upset him, to surprise him by being worse than he apparently remembers. Ryan has never been great at consequences. Shane is darkly glad to be one. “If we find it, we split it, and if you run off with it again, this time I will hunt you down and murder you in your sleep.”

Ryan studies him quietly. There is something in his expression that Shane cannot read. That’s never happened before — or at least, it had never happened when they knew each other. But Shane guesses he doesn’t know Ryan anymore, either. It’s been a long time.

“Again?” he asks, cocking his head to the side. “Is that — Shane, is that what you think I — ?”

“Well, Ryan, you and the gold were there and then you and the gold were not, so if you _didn’t_ want me to draw the obvious conclusion you probably should have left a note, buddy.”

Ryan looks away. “If doesn’t matter if we find it,” he mutters eventually, instead of answering directly. “Without the medallion it’s worthless.”

Shane sinks deeper into the water and closes his eyes again. “Well, that’s good,” he says, “because I lied. I do have it.”

“You _lied_?!” Ryan cries, like he hadn’t done it first, and worse.

“People do that sometimes,” Shane reminds him, and then sinks under the water so that he doesn’t have to talk anymore.

—

Shane blinks fuzzily awake a few hours later. The sun has already risen and it must be nearing noon, but the blinds in the bathroom are closed tight and there isn’t much light filtering in. The tub has been drained and there’s a towel draped over him like a blanket. Ryan is sitting on the floor by the door, asleep, his head tipped back against the wall. He doesn’t look comfortable.

Ryan’s eyelashes are stupid and long and casting shadows on his cheeks. Shane sinks down lower into the tub, pulling the towel up around his shoulders. It’s not comfortable; his back hurts; he needs to stretch his legs. But the entirety of the night's events are hitting him, and he doesn’t feel like he can move. The bathroom is warmly dim, illuminated only by the limited light filtering through the blinds and a flickering lamp that Ryan must have lit. The bathroom, warmed by steam, still tastes wet. There’s a line of condensation on Ryan’s top lip.

He thinks about Ryan asking if Shane really thought he’d taken the gold and run, as if it were a crazy thing to think, as if that wasn’t literally what happened.

It’s on the tip of his tongue to ask, to finally get an answer to the question he’s never let himself think about.

_What changed enough to make you leave?_

“Stop watching me sleep,” Ryan murmurs, without opening his eyes.

“I’m not,” says Shane, who is. “Get your things. We should get moving.”

He heaves himself out of the tub.

\--

Ryan is indeed still very much on his magic bullshit. Despite the fact that every time Shane looks at him he is seized by the impulse to start yelling, they manage to fall immediately back into their old rhythm of Ryan saying incredibly idiotic things about faith and spirits and power and Shane calmly reminding him that science is real and magic is made up.

“You can’t _not believe_ in Tanis,” Ryan tells him exasperatedly on the plane to Cairo, stealing his peanuts and eating them without asking. “It’s — dude, it’s a historical site. You can visit the ruins. We’re _going_ to the ruins.”

“I believe that Tanis was a city that existed,” Shane clarifies, rolling his eyes. “What I _don’t_ believe is that there is some special spooky well where the Ark of the Covenant is hidden to protect the world from its magical powers. Because that’s crazy. You’ve out-crazied yourself, Ryan, congratulations.”

“I have a _doctorate_ ,” Ryan sniffs.

“And yet here you are, so I guess they’re giving them to just anybody these days.”

“Oh come on,” Ryan says. “All these fucking years later and you _still_ can’t admit that it’s possible you don’t know everything?”

“There’s a lot that I don’t know. For example, how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? This is a mystery to me, Ryan. I know that a woodchuck would chuck all the wood that a woodchuck could if a woodchuck could chuck wood, but in terms of volume, it’s just impossible to say. I lie awake thinking about it.”

Ryan laughs, a wheezing sound that Shane is rapidly refamiliarizing himself with. He wants to be cold and reticent, but nothing has ever been more successful at getting Shane to talk than the need to refute whatever batshit crazy theory Ryan has just espoused.

“ _Dude_. I’m being serious.”

“Are you? Because I honestly can’t tell if you really believe this insane crap or if you’re just having a stroke.”

“I’m not _having a stroke_ , what the fuck.”

“Oh, okay, then you’re just a dumbass.”

“You’re still such a fucking dick,” Ryan laughs, shaking his head and looking out the window. Ryan has always had the great gift of not getting offended when Shane was an asshole to him. “Fine, whatever. You don’t believe there’s anything crazy going on. But a lot of people do, and they’re determined to get to the Ark before we do. And if they do, one of two things happens: either I’m right, and the world like _, literally_ ends, or you’re right, and they get all your money.”

Shane kicks his feet out into the aisle, stretching them out.

“Sounds like we gotta stop a bunch of thieves from stealing my money,” Shane says.

Ryan’s eyebrows knit together. “Well — technically, you are ... also going to be stealing it,” he points out. “I mean. Just putting that out there.”

“Yeah. But I’m going to steal it first. And better.”

“Okay, Bigfoot.”

Shane looks away. “Don’t call me that,” he snaps.

“I — sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

Shane shrugs, because apparently Ryan never had. “This isn’t some fun exercise in getting the band back together,” Shane tells him. He keeps his face expressionless. “I am getting money to rebuild the bar and then I’m out. We don’t need to see each other again.”

Ryan’s wide eyes are soft around the edges, sad. “If that’s what you want,” he agrees quietly.

“Yeah,” Shane lies. “It’s what I want.”

“Can ... ” Ryan swallows. “Can you just give me one chance to explain?”

Shane looks at him. He’s older but he’s just the same: earnest, bright, quick, and so full of something that glitters. Shane has learned his lesson about touching what isn’t his to hold.

He can’t — do this, again. He won’t survive. He barely survived the first time.

“No explanation necessary,” he says, as casually as he can over the lump in his throat. “We had a fling more than a decade ago that ended weirdly. It’s not that big of a deal, man.”

“ _Shane_ ,” Ryan sighs, eyes getting big and mouth pulling down. He clears his throat. “Yeah, um. I guess — I mean, we were just kids, right? It wasn’t like we were the loves of each other’s lives or — whatever.”

“Right,” Shane agrees, as if the word doesn’t taste like sandpaper.

Ryan nods. He’s not looking at Shane. His voice is peppy and oddly brave as he says, “Right. So then this will be fine.  We’ll just — we’ll find the Grail, and split whatever money we can get for selling it to a museum, and ... and then we’ll go our separate ways.”

“Great,” Shane agrees.

“Great,” says Ryan.

The plane touches down in Cairo.


	2. we have both fallen from the pure faith

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ryan and Shane go to Cairo, fight some masked villains, read Paleo-Hebrew literature, and remember that they were in love, once upon a time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> booooooooys.

They’re in Cairo to meet with Ryan’s friend Curly. Most people have colleagues, but Ryan is too lovable for that; even in their college days, he was always befriending everybody, getting late night access to the libraries because he’d buttered up all the librarians. Shane hadn’t thought he did it on purpose — it was just the way he approached the world, always willing to love it for its weirdness.

Now, of course, on the wrong side of Ryan making Shane love him and then ripping the rug out from under him, he’s not sure. Maybe it _is_ by design.

They’re posted up in a shitty motel, because Curly can’t meet them for a couple days. Ryan spends the time researching and giving Shane the background on what they’re even doing here. Shane thinks half of it is garbage but it’s easy to see why occult-obsessed whackjobs would fall for it.

“We’re not _whackjobs_ ,” Ryan mutters. “The Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail are clearly and consistently written about in a wide array of ancient texts. There are lots of theories about where they could be, some more believable than others.”

“And I bet you’re going to tell me about them,” Shane surmises, sinking down onto the bed and stretching out, closing his eyes. There’s only one bed in the room, which he figures just about fits with the run of luck he’s had over the last few days. He’s going to tell Ryan to sleep on the floor, and Ryan is going to do it, because he’s clearly being solicitous and careful with Shane, sweet in a way that makes Shane’s chest hurt.

He’s built him up over the years to be what he revealed with his absence, cold and calculating, but he isn’t. He’s just Ryan: messy, energetic, quick to smile and slow to anger.

He’s a good teacher, probably.

Ryan drops his bag by the door. “The theory I was initially working off is that the Ark and the Grail were both buried on Bornholm in the Baltic Sea in 1170. But despite some compelling arguments, it didn’t account for the invasion of Jerusalem in 150 BCE.”

“Is that before or after the Babylon Captivity?” Shane asks, interested despite himself. It’s been a long time since he flexed his academic muscles, but it turns out that it’s kind of like riding a bike.

Ryan grins, and Shane knows that he’s pleased that Shane is engaged. “After.”

“Hm.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“It’s not nothing, you hummed. I remember that hum. It means you have an opinion.”

Shane rolls his eyes. “Ryan, it’s been over a decade. Have you considered the possibility that my hums aren’t the same as they were when I was twenty-three?”

Ryan’s expression twists and he looks hurriedly at the mess of the desk as if searching for something in its wreckage. “Anyway, that brings us to our second theory,” he mutters. “That the illegitimate son of Solomon and Sheba stole the ark in around 1000 BCE and hid it in Aksum, Ethiopia, where it was guarded by a single monk. I thought this story was compelling, but — I don’t know. I have a hard time believing one dude in a habit would be entrusted with literally the most important relics of all time.”

Shane shrugs. “Maybe it was reverse psychology,” he theorizes, just to be an asshole. Ryan still has the same way of speaking when he’s talking Shane through his research: slow and steady, in his lower register. “They were like, ‘no one will believe we left this priceless artifact with our uncle, Monk Jehoshaphat the Mild.”

Ryan’s laugh tumbles out of him, warm and surprised. “Maybe he was Monk Jehoshaphat the Buff,” he jokes. “Jehoshaphat the Totally Ripped.”

Shane doesn’t want to laugh, but he can’t help it; Ryan is funny. He’s always been able to get Shane to laugh harder than anyone else, even when they’re bickering. “I guess there wasn’t much else to do in 1000 BCE except push-ups, prayer, and self-flagellation,” he muses.

Ryan makes an aborted jerking off gesture with his hand, but catches himself and looks away, wincing. It is occurring to Shane that Ryan doesn’t know how to be around him any more than Shane knows how to be around Ryan; they aren’t what they were, but they’ve never practiced at being anything else.

Into the silence, Shane sighs and says, “Okay, so what’s the final theory, then?”

Ryan clears his throat, giving Shane a grateful glance. “The final theory is Tanis. The Hebrews took the Ark to Canaan, and put it in a place called the Temple of Solomon, where it stayed for many years. Until all of a sudden ... ” he shrugs. “Woosh, it was gone. That being said, in 980 an Egyptian pharaoh invaded Jerusalem, and accounts say he took the ark and put it in a cave — ”

“Your spooky Hades pit,” Shane remembers. “Magical hocus pocus.”

“The _Well of Souls_ , yes. But Tanis was lost in a sandstorm. It wasn’t until several years ago that anyone remotely credible thought they’d located it. Do you remember Professor Yang?”

Shane blinks.

“ ... Vaguely,” he hedges. “Why?”

“Well — he found it. Or he claimed to have found it. He said he’d uncovered something promising out near Cairo, and he wrote to me asking whether I had come across any descriptions of the dimensions of the Staff of Ra. Of course, a staff would be useless without the headpiece — your medallion — but he must have thought ... well, I don’t know. But if you affix the medallion to the staff and hold it up to the light in a special room in Tanis, the sun will shine through the crystal and illuminate a map to the Well of Souls.”

“When?” Shane asks, frowning.

“I don’t know, just whenever. Sunset, probably; Egyptians loved sunset.”

“No, you idiot, I mean _when_ did he write you?”

Ryan thinks about it. “I guess — probably like six, seven years ago?”

Right around the time he’d left Nepal, Shane thinks. He’d assumed that his “urgent business” had been bullshit, but it turns out it was more legit than he’d suspected. Shane is vaguely insulted that Professor Yang hadn’t confided in him, but then, he supposes maybe he’d tried; when he asked about Ryan, Shane had shut him down so fast it was like he’d blown a candle out, and he’d never entertained much archaeology speak.

“I thought it was a reach,” Ryan is saying, “but then he turned up dead.”

Shane’s attention snaps back to Ryan so fast that it makes his head spin. “He _what_?”

“Yeah, it was — the weirdest fucking thing, man. He came back to the States talking about how he’d found Tanis and was going to find the Ark, and then one day they found him missing, his house wrecked and blood everywhere. Extremely grim shit. _Suspiciously_ grim shit. The only people I know who pull of that kind of thing over an old artifact are ... ” He gives Shane a glance and then looks studiously at a note on his desk. “— uh, tomb raiders. Which says to me that he was probably onto something.”

Shane’s brain feels heavy and tinny. The bar is gone and Professor Yang is gone and the raksi is gone, so Shane can’t even get drunk about it.

“Shane?” Ryan’s voice has gone soft and careful. “Shane, buddy. Are you okay?”

Shane wants to tell him. He wants to be sad out loud, and let Ryan comfort him about it, but he can’t, because Ryan would be too good at it, and Shane would forget. He’d forget why they were here, and why he even has the medallion in the first place. He can feel his stupid, traitorous heart beating, _so eager_ to believe that Ryan is here because he wants to be and that he left because he had to, rather than the reverse.

But Ryan is here because he’s on the trail of an artifact, and Professor Yang is dead because for the same reason, and Shane loves history but he’s never cared much for the way the past can reach forward and snatch things from you in the present.

“I’m fine,” he lies. “Surprised, is all. I liked Professor Yang.”

“Yeah,” Ryan agrees, still watching Shane with a pinched expression. “Me, too. He, uh ... he’s how I met you. Remember?”

Shane scrubs at his face. “I remember,” he says, and heaves himself up. “Look, I’m tired. It’s been a long day. I’m going to take a shower and then go to bed.”

If Ryan is surprised by the abrupt change of subject, he doesn’t say anything; just nods, and watches silently as Shane goes into the bathroom and closes the door. He turns the shower on and stands under the stream, not thinking anything, letting it wash away.

He stands there for a long time.

\--

The next day is spent locked in the hotel room, Ryan intent on researching his way into finding the Well of Souls and Shane intent on not being useful to him.

Ryan is the same, in most ways. He still laughs too easily, at everything Shane says, in that stupid wheezing way. He still loves research more than anyone Shane has ever met — he carries around notebooks full of scribbled notes supporting and debunking theories, hand-drawn maps sketched on scattered pages that he shoved into various pockets of his suitcase. What makes Ryan an excellent archaeologist is that he is willing to give anything plausible credence, and that he takes the target cultures at their word. If they say the statues walked somewhere, he believes them, and sets out not to prove how they were wrong but to understand why they were right.

Shane used to sit with a book in Ryan’s bedroom listening to him do his research, talking quietly to himself and muttering at maps. He’d bring him coffee as he started to droop and provide a sounding board for Ryan’s theories. Shane’s role had mostly been to be Ryan’s encyclopedia of cultural anthropology, helping him to decode the ways that cultures told their stories and made their maps.

Ryan was the forensic anthropologist, the puzzlemaster and quantitative data guy; Shane was the qualitative side, the interpreter of narratology and semiotics. In all honesty, he’d have probably been a folklorist if it weren’t for his chronic love of old things. You can’t hold a folk story the way you can hold the tablet it’s written on.

They’d been a good team.

Now, in their hotel room, Ryan’s eyes are slowly closing. They’re meeting Curly tomorrow, and Shane knows it would be kind for him to nudge Ryan awake. Maybe offer to make him coffee.

But that’s not his job anymore. Instead, he kicks a foot out at the leg of Ryan’s chair, sending it careening for a moment before Ryan pitches forward and stabilizes it.

“Dude,” Ryan protests, glaring at him. “What the fuck?”

“Wake up or go to bed but don’t sleep at the desk,” Shane tells him. “Just looking at you makes my back hurt.”

Ryan rubs at his eyes. “Fuck. I’m so tired. I haven’t slept in weeks, not since I realized what the medallion meant and where it was.”

Shane feels his eyebrows rise and he closes the book he’s been leafing through, marking his page with his finger. “You’ve known for weeks and only just came?” he asks, frowning.

Ryan’s cheeks darken with a blush. “Well,” he mutters. “I had ... stuff to do. I was busy.”

“You were busy,” Shane repeats dubiously. “Two days ago you were telling me this was a problem of biblical proportions and that we were up against, and I quote, ‘really bad shit.’ Now you’re telling me you were _too busy?_ ”

Ryan’s eyes cut away, back to his maps. He traces a finger idly along the equator. “Yeah, well. I’d hoped there was maybe another way. Other than, um. Bothering you.”

Shane knows he’s a broken record, repeating Ryan’s words but in a flabbergasted tone, but he can’t help it. “ _Bothering_ me? Ryan, you got my _bar_ burned down.”

“Dude, I said I was sorry about that. And, not to be a dick, but probably your bar would have burned down with or without me,” Ryan argues, rolling his eyes. “You can’t blame me for having the medallion because _you_ discovered it in the first place. _I_ wanted to leave it in the temple but _you_ said it had a certain, and I quote, _je ne sais quoi._ ”

“Yeah, but if you hadn’t left me a decade ago, I wouldn’t have still had it,” Shane points out without thinking. He winces at the admission. “It would be a museum somewhere, and therefore not my problem.”

Ryan hums, still looking at his map and not at Shane. “So, um ... why did you? Keep it?” he asks, too casual to actually be casual. “I mean, it’s worth several grand, easy.”

 _Because I loved you and I didn’t want to forget the good parts_ , Shane thinks, the stupidest and truest of all the reasons he has told himself over the years.

“Never got around to it, I guess,” he says. “And I never needed the money badly enough, once I got to Kathmandu.”

Ryan nods slowly, twirling his pencil in his hand. “You didn’t stay in Pokhara long. I thought you might — come back. To the U.S. Maybe ... you got into all those programs, I guess I assumed you’d take a spot at one of them. You really loved Stanford. You said the grass was shiny.” He chances a look at Shane, naked curiosity on his face.

There is a lump in Shane’s throat. “That’s a stupid thing to remember,” he mutters.

Part of him wants to play it off; to say what he said to his parents and his friends and anyone who’s asked, over the years: that he’d liked Nepal and thought archaeology was rapidly becoming an armchair field, populated with people too comfortable to visit the cultures they were studying or, worse, by people who went and then stole from them. It’s not a lie, exactly, but it misses the whole truth, which is that the joy of it had left with Ryan. Doing it on his own had seemed dreary and boring and unbearable.

“It didn’t feel like there was much there for me,” Shane decides eventually, a middle ground between truth and omission. “I just didn’t love it anymore.”

Ryan is watching him like he’s trying to read Shane’s expression. “Was it because ... ”

Shane waits. He knows what Ryan is asking but he won’t answer unless Ryan can bring himself to ask it.

Ryan swallows and looks up at the ceiling for a moment before returning gaze to Shane and smiling a little. “But you’ve been happy? You’ve been good?”

Shane thinks about saying no. He thinks about saying _you broke something in me that I never fixed; I just learned to live with the rattle of it._

But it feels too much like giving Ryan something, opening a door that Shane is determined to keep shut. He doesn’t want to give Ryan the gift of knowing how much more Shane had cared about what they had than Ryan apparently had.

“I’ve been fine, Ryan. A lot of people get dumped in their twenties. I moved on. It wasn’t the end of the world,” Shane tells him. He thinks Ryan is probably being sincere in asking. He might be using Shane for his medallion now the way he’d used him for his brain in the past, but Shane doesn’t think Ryan ever _set out_ to hurt him. He thinks probably he’d hoped he hadn’t, that Shane had been mad but fine, had left academia not because he couldn’t face the idea of seeing Ryan at conferences but because he’d gotten bored.

He pauses. “Wait,” he says, “how do you know I didn’t stay long in Pokhara?”

“I ... ” Ryan looks shifty, switching his weight from one foot to the other and stretching his arms over his head like he’s looking for a rope to pull him up and out of the room. Eventually, he admits, “I called the hotel, a couple days after I ... uh, when I got back to the States. They said you’d checked out.”

Shane’s brain stutters to a stop. “You called the hotel?” he repeats. “But — why?”

“What do you mean ‘why’?” Ryan asks, frowning. “To check on you. To make sure you were okay.”

“Ryan,” Shane says, pinching the bridge of his nose. It hurts to feel fond of Ryan for being bad at being an asshole. “You stole from me and left me alone in a hotel room without any explanation. What — what were you planning to _say_?”

Ryan shrugs. “I don’t know! I just. I wanted to hear your voice, I guess. I wanted to explain.”

Shane gapes at him.

“You wanted to — _Ry_ an. You _stole_ from me.”

Ryan winces. “I know. I’m ... ” He takes a deep breath. “Shane. You said you didn’t want an explanation so I won’t give you one. But I’m really, really sorry that I hurt you.”

“You didn’t _hurt_ me,” Shane refutes instinctively, a lie so blatant that Ryan gives him an extremely unimpressed look.

“You threw a shot glass at my head,” Ryan reminds him.

“I was startled.”

“Shane.”

He heaves a sigh, scratching at his forehead. “Well, we were young,” he acquiesces. “I got over it.”

Ryan snorts. He doesn’t look at Shane when he says, “Well — good for you, I guess,” and then buries his nose back in a book.

\--

Curly is exactly who Shane would expect someone named Curly to be.

Shane has been to Egypt before, but many years ago, when he and Ryan had come with Professor Yang on a summer dig. It is brighter and cleaner than he remembers, more full of things he finds interesting now that he’d ignored at twenty-four when all he’d wanted to do was be at the dig site or back at the hotel, his mouth attached to whatever part of Ryan he could reach. He is fascinated by the marketplace, the booksellers, the children running around in packs, the monkey in a vest that hops onto his shoulder from the high beams of the ceiling on Curly’s roof.

“Your friend made a friend,” Curly notes to Ryan, giving Shane a side-eye.

Curly is very dubious of Shane. He and Ryan had spoken in rapid-fire Arabic when they’d arrived, after Ryan had said, “Curly, this is my — uh, Shane.”

Curly’s eyebrows went way, way up,  and he’d said, “ _Shane_ Shane?”

Ryan had winced, face going dark with embarrassment as he nodded. Curly jabbed an accusatory finger at Ryan’s chest and flicked his eyes at Shane as if to make a point as he switched immediately to Arabic and began, Shane assumed, telling Ryan off. Ryan had just nodded and shrugged helplessly, leading Curly to let out a long and exasperated sigh.

“You’re such a fucking idiot, Ryan,” he’d diagnosed in English, probably for Shane’s benefit.

“Love you too, buddy,” Ryan had answered, grinning.

Now the three of them are gathered at a table while Curly’s nieces and nephews run around, occasionally swinging by to pet the monkey that has settled comfortably around Shane’s neck. He’s pretending not to listen to the conversation Ryan and Curly are having, but he suspects that Ryan sees through him, given the way he’s clarifying every obscure thing Curly says as if for his own benefit.

“It’s that American woman,” Curly grumbles, and Ryan quickly follows up with, “The weapons dealer we ran into in China, who was looking for the medallion?”

Shane and Curly give him matching looks to remind him that he isn’t fooling anybody. Curly sighs. “Yes, Ryan, the weapons dealer we met in China who is looking for medallion, thank you for the exposition. Clearly, she found it, and figured out that it was missing a key piece, because work stopped for a couple of weeks, until she returned a few days ago with a medallion much like this one here — but rough around the edges, and with markings on only one side.”

“Well, that’s going to be a problem for her,” Shane tells them. He holds the medallion up and runs his finger along the runes around the edge. It’s been a while since he’s stretched his linguistic muscles, but it’s not like he _forgot_ how to read Paleo-Hebrew. “This side says the staff should be six kadams high, which I’m assuming is the side your Americans have. But _this_ side ...” He flips the medallion over. Ryan and Curly lean in to get a better look. “It says _v’amah achat m’al kadesh, kabed Yahweh v’hamiskhkan_.”

Curly blinks up at him, nonplussed. Ryan’s mouth is spreading into a slow, proud smile, eyes wrinkled and pleased. “You call yourselves scholars,” Shane sniffs derisively, trying not to feel warmed by Ryan’s pride. “It means ‘and one amah above’ —or maybe ‘more’? It’s hard to say exactly — and then, this word kind of means holy, or more literally, set apart, but they _used_ it to mean holy. Obviously that last bit is just blah blah blah, honor Yahweh and the tabernacle, fairly standard warning mumbo jumbo. Basically it means you should make it seven kadams in total. Six, plus one to honor God with.”

Curly frowns. “So what are you saying? They’re digging in the wrong place?”

Shane grins. He meet Ryan’s eyes and they confirm at the same time, “They’re digging in the wrong place.”

—

Curly insists that it’s going to take time to get them disguises to sneak onto the dig site with, and he shoos Ryan and Shane out to the marketplace in a way that seems suspiciously gleeful to Shane.

They wander somewhat aimlessly around downtown Cairo, dipping in and out of shops. Ryan insists on buying Shane and his new pet monkey matching fezzes.

“Aw, she looks just like her dad,” he announces. “Cute.”

“She has my brains, too,” Shane says dryly when the monkey — which he has named TJ — crushes the fez in her hands and throws it on the ground with a shriek.

Ryan shakes his head, looking amused. “I can’t believe you named her _TJ_ ,” he groans. “That’s a boy’s name.”

“Please don’t gender essentialize my monkey daughter, Bergara,” Shane dismisses. “She’s not bound by human notions of normativity.”

“You’re saying I’m normative?”

Shane can’t quite keep the bitterness from his laugh when he says, “Ryan, you want like, a whole football team of babies. I’ll bet you have like forty-two students with shitty parents who come to your place for Thanksgiving.”

Ryan cuts him a look. “No I don’t,” he insists, in a voice that tells Shane that yes, he does. “Anyway, you can want kids and not be normative, depending on who you want them with.”

“I guess,” Shane agrees.

“I used to think we’d — uh,” he cuts himself off sharply, veering suddenly into an alleyway bookshop, “anyway, what about you? Any little Shanes running around?”

Shane follows him into the bookshop, head spinning at the change of subject. “I’ve been running in and living above a bar, Ryan,” he points out. “Not exactly a child-friendly environment.”

Also, Shane hasn’t been much for dating. There were a few flames — and a few patrons from far-off places that swing by the bar when they were in town. But he had kind of a no-dating policy.

“Yeah, well. Me either.”

Shane hates himself for the swell of relief that expands his chest, and it’s this more than anything that makes him irritated: his own weak heart, still wanting to be Ryan’s favorite.

He sighs, and changes the subject, to avoid going down this road. “Well, I suppose it’s for the best you never settled down to be the stay-at-home-dad of your dreams,” he muses. “The archaeology world would be lost without its famed Dr. Bergara, the man, the myth, the legend.”

Ryan rolls his eyes. “All that stuff is — whatever,” he mumbles. He’s running his fingers across the spines of all the books, a habit that used to drive Shane nuts. “I only find stuff to fund my research. It’s good for the university’s reputation.”

“And your own.”

Ryan shrugs. “I guess, but who gives a shit?” he muses. “Half the people at conferences think I’m like, a crazy occultist, and half think I’m — a thief, basically.”

“I mean. You are both those things.”

Shane knows he’s being an asshole to get a rise out of Ryan, to prove to himself that he doesn’t need Ryan to like him, that he doesn’t need to give in to the buoyant way his heart felt to learn that Ryan hasn’t found some nice Californian to settle down with. But he can’t help it.

Ryan gives him a droll look. “Okay, big words from the man currently in Cairo to obtain and sell the _words of God_ , dude.”

“Yeah, but I _know_ I’m a thief,” Shane argues. “I don’t try to disguise it with — academic rigor.”

“No?” Ryan asks. “And you don’t think you’re disguising your intellectual desire to find the Ark behind your insistence that you’re in it for the money?”

 _Damnit,_ Shane thinks.

“I’m intellectually engaged in the Ark as a piece of religious and cultural significance,” Shane admits. “But that’s _in addition to_ wanting the money. It’s a happy confluence of interests.”

Ryan snorts. “Sure thing, big guy.”

“Shut up, tiny Tim.”

Ryan just laughs, the way he always has when Shane is rude to him. Shane bites down the urge to say something genuinely hurtful, just to prove he can. Ryan’s laugh is loud and unfettered and delighted, and Shane hates how easy it is, to bicker with him, to fall back into old rhythms.

“Dude, that’s weak,” Ryan manages through giggles. He offers Shane a small, purpled candy. “Have a date. C’mon, I’m starving.”

“What’s this?”

“It’s a date. You eat ’em.”

Shane opens his mouth to explain to Ryan that he _knows_ what a _date_ is, what he’s asking about is the culinary _style_ of the date, when Ryan stops dead in his tracks and says, voice low, “Shane, get down.”

“What?” Shane asks, and then Ryan is shoving him downward and punching out over his head. Shane twists to see a man in a black scarf collapsing behind him, a handful of identically-dressed people in his wake. “Well, shit,” he says, and rolls to the side, grabbing out for a discarded pot and swinging it wildly as he climbs back to his feet, catching one of them on his head.

Ryan has taken on the group of them, fighting with expertise that surprises Shane. The Ryan he remembers hated fighting, thought it was stupid, and far preferred to just make friends with everybody to sweet talk them into giving him what he wanted.

Now, he fights with a kind of resigned, if messy, skill.

Shane swings his pan again. He himself does _not_ fight with skill. He fights like he’s been living above a bar for the last decade, which means he feels no remorse at all aiming a frying pan directly at one of their attacker’s dicks.

“Shane, get out of here!” Ryan yells over his shoulder at him. “I’ll come find you!”

“Shane, get out of here, I’ll come find you,” Shane mimics in a high-pitched voice. “Not fucking likely, Bergara. I’m not letting you out of my sight until I’ve got my money.”

“Oh for _fuck’s sake_ , dude,” Ryan grumbles, shoving one of the men into the back of a hay truck, which promptly takes off, rattling down an alley. Shane realizes abruptly that TJ is gone, sitting on top of one of the nearby stalls and watching them with calm. It’s good that _somebody_ has faith in Shane’s ability, then.

Suddenly Ryan spins on his heel, grabbing Shane’s wrist and dragging him down an alley. Shane is hit with a sense of deja-vu, the two of them clinging to each other and sprinting away from something that wants to kill them — years ago it had been booby traps and temple guards, but the feeling is the same.

Shane guesses Ryan hadn’t been lying, when he’d said there were other people after the Ark. He wonders whether Ryan’s life is often like this, stealing things before other people could steal them, and then avoiding their wrath.

Someone is shooting at them. Shane slides a little as Ryan takes a sharp left turn, but gets purchase and pursues him quickly enough. As they’re running past a stack of baskets, Ryan turns his head and shouts, “Shane, I’m really sorry, but I promise this is for your own good.”

“What?” Shane asks, and then Ryan stops running and shoves Shane directly into one of the baskets, yanking the lid down on top of it.

“I KNOW YOU’RE MAD BUT STAY THERE,” Ryan shouts, and then there’s nothing Shane can hear except gunfire and the pounding of feet. He considers ignoring Ryan and leaping out, but he doesn’t know where the bullets are coming from, and he’s concerned that suddenly presenting a target will have a negative effect on his goal not to get shot in the head.

Suddenly, Shane feels the basket lifting, and hears Ryan’s voice calling his name. He’s being _carried_ , he realizes — carried on a bunch of shoulders, which is impressive, because Shane is heavy. He punches up, but the lip of the basket has been tied shut.

 _Fuck_ , he thinks. _Okay. Problem-solve, Madej._

He pats his pockets, looking for a knife, but doesn’t have one; he has no way of telling what direction they’re going; and he’s not going to shout for Ryan’s help, because Shane would probably rather just die than admit to Ryan that he needs him.

Luckily, Shane does have one thing that his kidnappers were probably not accounting for, which is that he’s seventy-two feet tall. He gathers his legs up underneath him as best he can, and then just — stands up.

The string holding the baskets shut goes taut and fights him a little, but Shane keeps pushing up, his neck craned awkwardly and his shoulder taking most of the pressure. The basket starts to wobble, his movements making it more difficult to carry, and he kicks up again, this time at an angle so that his weight shifts enough for one of the men to stumble. The joint pressure of Shane’s shoulder and the yank of the basket falling are too much for the string, which snaps. The lid tumbles off and so does Shane, landing heavily on a series of shoulders as the whole group goes down.

Without thinking, Shane kicks out as he scrambles to his feet, catching someone on the chin and someone else in the stomach, and then sprints without looking behind him. Eventually he finds a building that looks mostly empty, and he dives into it, pulling himself up to his whole height and sucking his breath in to stand between a gap in the wall. The group pursuing him runs past.

Shane stays where he is, for a little while, waiting. Distantly, he hears an explosion, and then absolute silence.

When he thinks its safe, he pokes his head out and makes his way back down the ruined alley, back to where Ryan had shoved him into a basket. Ryan’s not there. The marketplace has resumed life as usual, like group fights are nothing too out of the ordinary.

Ryan is gone.

 _Not again_ , Shane thinks.

—

It turns out that Shane and Ryan have something in common, which is that when they think the other person has disappeared, their first course of action is to find a bar and set up shop in it.

Shane finds Ryan with the help of Curly’s nieces and nephews, who have some kind of supernatural homing beacon on him. He’s hunched over in a bar, drinking directly from the bottle, bleary eyed and grouching at the waiters.

“Okay, buddy, let’s go easy on the celebratory libations,” Shane scolds him, gently peeling the bottle from his hand.

Ryan blinks up at him. He frowns. “Shane?” he asks. “Don’t yell at me, you’re dead.”

This is news to Shane.

“Well, then I guess you were right about ghosts,” he muses, taking a seat. “I don’t feel dead, but maybe that’s part of it.”

Ryan shakes his head. “No, I saw — they put the basket in a truck. And then the truck exploded.”

Something clenches in Shane’s chest. Maybe his heart.

“Ryan, I’d like to invite you to consider the possibility that you got the baskets mixed up,” he says gently. “There were a lot of them and they all looked the same.”

Ryan is still staring at him, mouth slightly ajar. “Shane?” he asks softly.

The sun is setting and it’s making Ryan’s skin a warm, soft brown, his eyes liquid and dark. Shane can see the intelligence clicking behind the layer of alcohol, the slow realization that Shane is here, that he isn’t dead; he doesn’t know what to make of that, of the depth of Ryan’s suddenly joy to see him, the force of his relief.

“Yeah, buddy,” Shane promises, not quite able to meet his eyes, not quite able to handle what he sees there.

“ _Shane_ ,” Ryan breathes, and stands up, yanking him in by the front of his shirt and kissing him.

It’s — not a very good kiss, objectively. Ryan is too drunk to have good aim, and too emotional to deploy any skill at all. Mostly it feels like them mashing their faces together. Shane’s instinct is to pull away immediately, but he can feel the desperate panicked thrum in Ryan’s body, and he’s not — whatever is happening with Ryan, whatever happened eleven years ago, you can’t fake your heartbeat. Maybe Ryan lied to him and is lying to him, but he’s relieved Shane is alive, desperately relieved, so Shane doesn’t pull all the way back. Instead, he shifts them into a hug, tucking Ryan’s head underneath Shane’s chin and giving his back a small rub.

“Hey now, there you go, little guy,” he murmurs. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”

Ryan hiccups. His hands come up to cling around Shane’s middle. “Fuck you,” he grumbles. “I’m not drunk.”

“I didn’t say you were drunk,” Shane reminds him, amused.

“You were _thinking it_ ,” Ryan argues, and this is true, so Shane just laughs and eases them apart. Ryan slumps back into his seat and gestures with his hand at the bottle. Shane looks at him and looks at the bottle and feels the tingling of his mouth where Ryan had kissed him, and decides that being drunk would be better than thinking about it, so he raises it to his mouth and takes a long, long drink.

This will turn out to be the first in a series of bad decisions that Shane makes. The waiters keep bringing them more, filling up their glasses without being asked. At some point in the evening, TJ shows back up, much to Shane’s unbridled and almost embarrassing joy. Within a few hours, they are leaning into one another, bickering over who is going to pay the bill and who is more drunk and who lost the library book sophomore year that they’re both still getting debt letter notices about.

The fundamental problem, he thinks, is that Ryan is still _Ryan,_ in all the ways that he had been when Shane fell for him the first time. He’s funny, and sharp, and willing to believe almost anything people tell him. He stutters when he’s nervous. He talks with his hands, a vehicle for the manic energy that has always propelled him. He looks at Shane like Shane is going to tell him the secrets of the universe.

And it’s _tiring,_ to stay mad, to keep the walls up, to play defense.

Ryan, drunk and giggly, keeps trying to tell him a joke about two geopolitical anthropologists who walk into a bar, but he can’t make it through without laughing.

“You’re drunk,” Shane diagnoses, fondly.

“Am not,” Ryan argues. “I am great at drinking. I was in a fra-tern-it-y.”

Shane laughs. The room is wobbly. “I remember,” he says. “You made me go to all the toga parties.”

“You looked good in a toga,” Ryan says remorselessly, beaming at him.

Shane wants to kiss him. Shane is desperately paying attention to TJ so that he won’t.

“ _Man_ , I’ve missed you, you have no idea,” Ryan tells him carelessly on a sigh. “Oh, hey, the beer is gone. That’s weird.”

“Ryan,” Shane tries to say, but what comes out is a garbled sound as TJ does him a solid and slaps him on the mouth with her tail.

Ryan tips over backward, laughing. “I gotta pee,” he announces. “Then, to Curly.”

He stands up, wobbling slightly, and toddles toward the bathroom. Shane stares down at his monkey and tells her sternly, “We’re not doing this again, TJ. We are not. Okay? Do you agree?”

TJ screams at him, which Shane takes as affirmation.

“Good monkey,” he tells her proudly, and pats her head before putting his own down on the table and closing his eyes.

—

 _S h a n e_ come onnnn you’re so heavy and so fucking _tall_ jesus how do your bones even work am I going to have to carry you all the way back to Curly’s because it’s far, it’s _fa-a-a-ar._ Shane Shane Shane. Shane I missed you. Shane. I didn’t say your name for such a long time, they asked me about you, everybody asked me about you, everybody knew that you were — Shaaaaane are you listening? Shane will you let me _explain_? Jesus watch your step, that fucking monkey is gonna draw attention, TJ, Teej, baby girl please be quiet we are in quiet time now. Shane buddy we’re almost there okay?

Shane did you miss me. I know it’s selfish to ask. I know it’s selfish but did you miss me? A little?

—

The room is spinning. Shane is lying on a bed and the room is whirling around him.

Ryan is asleep beside him, a wall of pillows built between them. Shane remembers that Ryan always used to do that, because Shane is an octopus at night, and Ryan overheats. He’s startled by the force with which this memory hits him.

He sifts through the memories from the night before, hazy around the edges. The dying sun on Ryan’s shoulders, both of them laughing about various branches of anthropology. Ryan practically carrying him home, his voice warm and slurry in Shane’s ear. _Shane did you miss me? I know it’s selfish to ask._

What Shane cannot figure out is what Ryan _wants_ from him.

“Of course I missed you,” he admits quietly, in the dark. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

Ryan snores once, and sleeps on.

—

In the morning, Shane and Ryan studiously avoid looking at one another, which makes Curly roll his eyes heavily and obviously. He throws long white kaftans and headscarves at them with instructions to put them on and cover their faces.

“It doesn’t seem like these would have taken you all of yesterday to get,” Shane points out dubiously. He is beginning to suspect that Curly has ulterior motives.

“No? Are you an expert in Egyptian sartorial commerce?” Curly snaps. “Didn’t think so. Put on the kaftan, white boy.”

Shane raises his hands in surrender and pulls the kaftan on over his clothes, wrapping the scarf around his head. Ryan does the same. Even Shane has to admit that with the extra material pulled up around their mouths, they’re not recognizable. Or at least unrecognizable enough that they’re able to fairly easily make their way through the crowded dig site without drawing attention. They make it without incident to the map room, which of course is accessible only through a hole in the ceiling. Shane is tempted to go in himself, but even he has to admit that he doesn’t have the arm strength to climb back up.

“Looks like a job for Biceps Bergara,” he grumbles, handing over the headpiece. “But please try to remember that if you fuck me on this I will destroy everything you love.”

Ryan rolls his eyes. “Chill,” he insists. “Can you just experiment with trusting me, dude?”

“Yeah, that’s worked out _great_ for me in the past,” Shane snaps back, too hungover to manage his brain-to-mouth filter. He feels oddly delicate, the hangover and the events of yesterday building up in a tangled mess of emotions, his mouth aching like it’s bruised from Ryan kissing him so badly.

“Shane,” Ryan says, and then sighs, shaking his head. He wraps a hand around the rope and then rolls into the open hole in the ceiling, sliding with control down the rope to the ground. Shane is irritated by how easy he makes it look, but he doesn’t have much time to admire it before Ryan is putting the medallion into the head of the staff and holding it up.

Shane holds his breath, watching.

“Red alert, incoming,” Curly mutters beside him, and stands up, brushing dust from his pants. He speaks in easy Arabic to the men who have approached them while Shane hangs back, pretending not to look at the hole where he’s left Ryan and pretending he can understand what’s being said. He nods when Curly nods, and does a little bow when Curly tilts his head.

They’re led away from the map room and over to another part of the dig site, where Shane guesses they’re just going to be free labor until they can find a way to get Ryan out.

“He’ll be fine,” Curly mutters at him, giving him a knowing glance.

Shane stiffens. “I don’t care about that,” he lies. “I care that my _money_ is fine.”

Curly huffs out a laugh as he bends down to sweep sand from a rock with something written in Paleo-Hebrew on it. Shane squints down to read it, but the edges have been too worn away, and he can’t tell what too many of the letters were.

“It is interesting to meet you, finally,” Curly muses. “I’ve heard so much about the famous Shane. The brilliant Shane. The tall and handsome Shane.”

“The tired Shane,” Shane answers, because he doesn’t want to hear about it, that Ryan spoke of him, that Ryan spoke _fondly_ of him. It almost makes it worse, to know that there weren’t any hard feelings. That Ryan was fond and dismissive the way you might be of a child. “The hungover Shane. The disinterested Shane.”

“The Shane who’s gonna get his white boy ass kicked if he doesn’t curb the attitude,” Curly says.

Shane chuckles, despite himself, and raises his free hand in surrender. His head hurts from the sun and the alcohol and not having had enough water. “Can we just — I can appreciate that he’s your friend, and you care about him, and that’s really great for the both of you, but can we not?”

Curly hums. “He cares about you,” he says. “I know there’s a whole _drama_ going on between you that I’m very uninterested in getting involved with, but I’ve known that boy a long time, and in all the years we’ve been friends there’s never been any word that he says the way he says your name.”

Shane’s breath catches in his throat, and he looks away. He can feel Ryan’s breath against his ear mumbling _I didn’t say your name for such a long time_.

“Yeah, well,” Shane grumbles around the lump in his throat. “You should hear him talk about ghosts.”

Curly laughs, but the look he gives Shane is shrewd. “I _have_ heard him talk about ghosts,” he says. “Aren’t you listening? I just said he talks about _you_.”

 _Everything out of your fucking mouth is a ghost story_ , Shane thinks again, and buries his shovel into the dirt.

—

Curly is right, of course; Ryan is fine. They manage to sneak back to the map room just after sunset and drop the rope down; Ryan hauls himself up it with an ease that makes something warm swirl deep in Shane’s stomach, and which he tamps down on ruthlessly.

They dig on the edge of the city, on a bit of a raised platform that’s somewhat obscured by old dirt deposits. It allows them to work unnoticed. The sun start had started coming up by the time they find anything; Shane’s eyes are scratchy and tired and Ryan is cutting out a dark silhouette in front of the orange sky. “Ryan! Here! We’ve hit stone!”

Shane’s eyes snap up to Ryan’s, and they both go stumbling toward where a few diggers have gathered.

“Clear it off,” Ryan commands. “C’mon, find the edges!” They brush away the first with their hands, a square opening taking shape. “Okay! Bring the prybars in! Push! Get them in there — get them under. Hey! Watch your toes.”

Shane rolls his eyes. “My toes are fine,” he says.

“Okay, fine. _Don’t_ watch your toes but don’t come crying to me when this hundred-pound door falls on your feet and shatters them.”

“Listen, Bergara — ”

“Both of you _shut up_ ,” Curly snaps. “Look. It’s open.” Shane and Ryan turn as one to where the stone has been moved. In the dark, it’s just a dark hole, vague shapes cutting out the edges. They peer over the edge as someone runs to get a torch. “Why does the floor move?” Curly asks.

Shane has a terrible feeling that he knows the answer to this question.

Ryan takes the torch that he is handed and drops it down into the room; sure enough, in the area it lights up, Shane can clearly see the slithering of snakes. “Asps,” he says, stomach tightening. “Well, that’s — not ideal, boys.”

He glances over at Ryan, who’s gone pale.

Ryan hates snakes.

“You — Ryan, are you okay?” Shane asks quietly, worried despite himself. “I can go down and report back. You wait here; Curly will come.”

“Curly will not, actually,” Curly interjects. “I’m not going into a den of fucking snakes, bitch are you crazy?”

Ryan shakes his head. “It’s fine,” he says. “I’m fine. They’re just. It’s just snakes. I’ve faced worse.”

He has a look on his face that Shane finds painfully, stupidly familiar: the look of Ryan being brave, of facing something that makes all his bones rattle. Without another word, he grabs the rope they’ve lowered and throws himself downward, not giving himself any time to think about it.

He takes a moment to think about what his life would have been, if Ryan had never bulldozed his way into it. Shane would probably be a mild and uninteresting folklorist, teaching students who irritated him in order to fund obscure research that nobody but him found interesting. Maybe he’d still live in Illinois. Maybe he’d have moved back to _Schaumburg._

“You’re gonna have to pull me up,” Shane warns Curly before following. “I don’t have those guns.”

Instead of answering, Curly kicks him lightly toward the entrance. Shane closes his eyes and steps off the edge.

—

“Jesus,” Shane says, staring at the Ark. The gold of it lights up, illuminated despite there being no other light in the chamber. His blood is thrumming in his body, heart in his throat. He’d forgotten. _God_ , he’d forgotten, how good this was, how good it felt, this part of it. The _solving_. The finding of things, the way they were revealed to you as if someone in the past was looking forward, knowing you would come. As if the things you found had been put there only for you to find.

He frowns. “It doesn’t look like the Grail is here,” he notes. “I wonder what happened to it.”

He reaches out a hand to touch the edge of the Ark, but he’s slapped away by Ryan. “ _Careful_ , dude, what the fuck,” he hisses. “Don’t you remember what the headpiece said? _Honor Yahweh, whose tabernacle this is._ Don’t fucking touch it.”

Shane rolls his eyes. “It’s just a relic, Ryan. What do you think is going to happen? God’s going to strike me down?”

“Maybe,” Ryan snaps. “Or maybe they booby-trapped the ever living fuck out of it, so that sacrilegious assholes like you couldn’t get their hands on it.”

That actually does make some sense, so Shane gives in and help Ryan slide a piece of wood under it for them to lift. It’s heavy — Shane guesses this shouldn’t surprise him, given that most of it is made from what looks like solid gold.

Not to minimize its value as a historical artifact, but _God_ , Shane is going to be so fucking rich.

They make it all the way back from the antechamber to the main room before Shane almost steps on an asp and has to drop his end of it, leaping up onto the base of one of the statues. Ryan takes his whip — _who carries a whip?_ Shane thinks — from his belt loop and snaps the asp, stunning it. Shane, standing with his arms around the legs of whatever creature this statue is supposed to be, breathes out a long, shaky sigh.

“If I die from asp bite I swear to God I will _create_ ghosts just to come back and haunt you,” he grumbles, rubbing at his ankle where the asp had aimed. He hops down and resumes carrying the Ark, until they lower it onto the pulley system for Curly to wheel up. They watch it rise, and something lights up in Shane’s chest.

They did it. They found it. They _won._

The Ark disappears up over the edge.

Shane can’t quite find the borders of the way he feels, too many emotions swirling in the mix. They’d found it, _it_ , arguably the most significant relic of all time, and they’d done it together. Shane is going to sell it and make money off of it and have his name attached to it forever, his name and Ryan’s, the way it would have always been, if Ryan hadn’t ruined it, if Ryan hadn’t broken everything they were trying to build together.

Why did Ryan kiss him last night? Why was he so relieved to find Shane alive, even though he had the medallion, and he didn’t need Shane to get what he wants? How could Ryan steal from him and leave him and then miss him? What gives him the right?

And what did Curly mean, about the way Ryan says his name?

“Curly?” Ryan calls.

Nothing happens.

Shane muses, “It will almost be worth the devastating effects on my bank account if he’s run off with our find, just to see the look on your stupid face. Which surprises me, because I care about my bank account significantly more than I care about getting revenge for being unceremoniously dumped a decade ago.”

Ryan goes stiff.  “Look,” he snaps, voice tight, “I know we — I know what happened between us didn’t matter to you, all right? I get it. You’ve told me enough fucking times. But it mattered to _me_ , okay? So can you not treat it like it was just some stupid fling?”

Shane blinks, taken aback. He turns to squint at Ryan in the low light of the torch. “What are you — Ryan, what the fuck are you talking about? _You’re_ the one who left!” he points out. He guesses they’re having this conversation now, at probably the worst possible time to have it, surrounded by asps and potentially abandoned in a pit; but isn’t that just like them, anyway. “You stole everything we’d found and you left me alone and you went back to the States and made your career using our joint findings and you never even — I wasn’t hard to fucking _find_.”

“I couldn’t!” Ryan cries, spinning to face him. “Jesus, I thought you _died_ yesterday, and now — you’re not _listening_ to me. I _couldn’t_. The people who — it’s not _tomb raiders_ , Shane. The things we took from that temple, the idol and the staff and all those things, the people who wanted them didn’t want them for money. They wanted them for their power.”

Shane rolls his eyes. “Sure, their _magic_ _power_ ,” he dismisses tiredly, scrubbing at the bridge of his nose. “Cut the shit, Ryan.”

Ryan makes an irritated and hurt sound as he stalks over to the foundation of the statue and throws himself dramatically onto it. “This is _why,_ ” he bites out. “This is exactly why. I knew you wouldn’t take it seriously. I knew you’d say _cut the shit Ryan_ and you wouldn’t — treat artifacts with the care you have to treat this stuff with, wouldn’t be _careful_ , and they’d — did you ever even read up on it? On the idol? Do you even know what the legends say?”

“Enlighten me.”

“It’s a _death omen_. It — everything it touches it destroys. _That’s_ why they made it so fucking hard to get to. It wasn’t to protect the idol, it was to protect the idiots trying to get to it. And you just ... you kept reaching out to grab it with your bare fucking hands.”

Shane pinches the bridge of his nose. He’s too exhausted to fight with Ryan about whether or not magic is real. He’s too fucking tired to bear thinking that Ryan left him because he was convinced that some golden fucking monkey might — make Shane’s hand fall off, or whatever.

“Well, it’s in a museum now, and so far the museum hasn’t crumbled,” Shane points out. “So you could have swallowed your fucking pride and called me at literally _any point_ between then and now.” He turns his face up to the entrance and makes a bid for escaping this conversation: "Curly! Come on, buddy. I'm begging you to free me from what's happening right now."

Ryan shakes his head. “It’s not in a museum,” he says, as if Shane hasn't spoken. “They did — there was one exhibition, but weird shit kept happening. The curator got sick, really sick, and then — all these accidents kept happening. I tried to convince them not to do it in the first place, but they wouldn’t listen, nobody ever fucking _listens_ , and then it was stolen. The night guard was killed. He was — ” Ryan swallows, his hand tightening into a fist at his side. “He was a really nice guy. His name was David. He had twin girls and a wife, Elaine, who always brought me cookies when she knew I was working late. And then he died, and it was — it was because of me, because of what I brought back.”

“Ryan,” Shane says, finally looking at him. “You can’t — you don’t seriously believe — ”

“Don’t _Ryan_ me, God, this is my fucking _point_ ,” Ryan snaps. His eyes snap to Shane and the words spill out of him like a dam breaking: “That night that I left. We’d — you hadn’t noticed, but we’d been followed. It was that French douchebag, Belloq, you remember? I cornered him in the lobby downstairs and he — he was talking all this shit about the idol, how powerful it was, how it gave its owner the power to bestow death, really dark fucking shit, Shane, and I just — I realized. What I’d — fuck, _gotten you into_ , the kind of people who were going to know your name, who were going to try to — I just. You didn’t believe and you _wouldn’t_ believe and you wouldn’t take any fucking precautions and I — ”

Shane tries to follow the thread, tries to parse what Ryan is saying down to something he can understand. “You left because Belloq scared you?” he asks. “That lanky weirdo who wore skinny ties at conferences? _That_ guy?”

“First of all, it’s kind of hypocritical for you to call anyone _lanky_ ,” Ryan tells him, calm for a moment. He scrubs at his face. “I wasn’t scared of Belloq.”

“Then you’ve got to clarify some things for me, buddy, because I’m not — I’m not following.”

Ryan goes still, studying him with an expression Shane can’t read. He looks like he is trying to memorize the topography of Shane’s face, like Shane is a legend he is trying to unravel to find the truth at the heart of it.

“I was — fucking _stupid_ in love with you,” Ryan finally, voice quiet and firm and so full of regret that Shane can barely stand to listen to it, and the world tips over, a low ringing pitching up in Shane’s ears.

“Jesus, Shane. It’s was _embarrassing_ , how obvious I was, how fucking — ensorcelled, and everyone knew. Everyone. The way I looked at you, I — thank God they only had that stupid Polaroid and not any of the others, because they’d have known, they’d have seen immediately how easy it would be, to get me to — do whatever, say whatever, give them whatever.”

Shane’s head is spinning. He can’t seem to make this Ryan square with the one in his head, the ghost that has lived with him for the last decade.

“I knew you didn’t believe in the idol and I knew you never would, and the people who did believe — they were going to come for us and never stop coming until they got what they wanted. And I couldn’t ... God, the thought that — that something might _happen_ to you. That one day I would wake up and you would — you would be dead, because of me, because of something I dragged you out to find. And then yesterday. The truck, I — ” He swallows thickly and takes a long, wet inhale.

Ryan’s hands are shaking. Shane can’t make any of this make sense.

“I thought the only way to keep you safe was to make you mad enough to stop doing fieldwork. I figured you’d — I mean, you always liked the stories better, anyway. I thought you’d come back and do folklore like you always wanted. I didn’t think ... I didn’t mean to take all of it away. I didn’t realize you loved artifact hunting so much.”

The world is tilted on its axis. Shane can’t quite see straight. He takes in Ryan, standing in front of him with his hands clenched into fists, eyes wide and bright and sad, saying _I didn’t realize you loved artifact hunting so much_ like that’s what he really believes, that Shane was so offended he’d been conned out of a find that he just quit the field entirely.

He tries to understand what Ryan is saying in any way that makes sense, in any way that doesn’t cast the last decade in an entirely different light: that Ryan had loved him, and loved him enough to try, in his own stupid, impulsive way, to protect him; that Ryan’s belief in the supernatural was deep enough and real enough that he’d thought, genuinely, that Shane’s life was at risk because of something they’d found, together.

He thinks about all the times Ryan had scolded him for trying to touch the idol, how Shane had teased him by reaching out for it and making spooky ghost sounds. He’d thought it was stupid; he still thinks it’s stupid.

But Ryan doesn’t. Ryan believes. Ryan really believes that if Shane had touched it, it would have killed him, and Shane hadn’t taken that belief seriously.

He doesn’t know how to understand that Ryan was wrong to leave him without explanation but right that Shane wouldn’t have listened to any explanation he’d given. That Shane in all likelihood would have rolled his eyes and grabbed the idol and said, _Boom. Look, I’m touching it and nothing bad is happening, you loon._

“I didn’t — Ryan,” Shane says, voice breaking. It hurts to say out loud but it seems cruel to let Ryan stand there with his chest cut open for Shane to see inside and not give anything back. “I didn’t leave the field because I loved _artifact hunting_. I loved artifact hunting because I loved _you_ , you fucking — monstrously stupid moron.”

Ryan’s eyes snap to his own. “What?”

“What do you mean, _what_? You think I threw my fucking life away because I was irritated that you stole from me?”

Ryan’s jaw drops. He gapes at him, wordless, like this is something he had never considered: that Shane had loved him more than he had loved history.

“But — Shane. You never said.”

“ _You_ never said!”

“It was obvious! Every time I looked at you it was basically written in glowing letters above my head!”

“Well I couldn’t fucking _see_ that because I had lights above mine!”

They’re both breathing heavily. Shane wants to hit Ryan and kiss him at the same time, and he’s about to move to do one or the other when their rope slides down from the entrance and into the temple.

Over the edge, a familiar female face appears. She smiles down at them, and gives a little wave.

“Mister Bergara!” she calls down. “How did you wind up in such an awful place?”


	3. it's not the years, honey, it's the mileage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ryan and Shane find an Ark, find a middle ground, and find each other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well guys, it's finished! today was an absolutely garbage day 2 be a human person in america, so here. have some boys in love. come visit me on [ tumblr](www.itsvarnes.tumblr.com), if you want!

“It’s _Doctor_ Bergara,” Shane says. “I’ve told you that, like, four times.”

“Thank you, Shane,” says Ryan.

The woman rolls her eyes. “Very touching,” she says. “If I had known that Mr. Madej was such an obvious pressure point, _Doctor_ Bergara, perhaps I would have pressed it earlier. It could have saved both of us a lot of time.”

“You should have stolen a different Polaroid, I guess,” Ryan tells her, voice light. But Shane can see him glancing around for options. He swings the torch toward some of the snakes that have begun slithering toward them. “Be a better thief.”

“Well, I think I’m doing okay, as far as thievery goes,” she muses, indicating the two of them. “You see, I am up here, with the Ark, and you are down there, without it, where I am afraid you are about to become a permanent part of this archaeological find.”

Shane swallows down the panic in his throat. He glances at Ryan, who is glaring upwards. “I’ll tell you what,” he says, “that sounds not great to me. That sounds like something I would prefer not to do, personally. Ryan? What are your thoughts?”

“I’m opposed,” Ryan agrees, without looking at him. “At least let Shane come up.”

Shane takes a moment to stare at him. “I’m not leaving without you,” he insists, rolling his eyes. “Ryan. Come on.”

“Don’t — fucking _argue_ with me right now, dude, are you kidding?”

“Are _you_ kidding? I’m not going to fucking _leave you_ here, Ryan. It’s a pit of _snakes._ You _hate_ snakes.”

Ryan visibly startles, then softens. “Shane,” he says.

 _I just **found you** again_, Shane thinks, helplessly.

“This is very sweet,” the woman says, “but just to clarify, neither one of you is leaving. Best of luck, boys. I and my bank account thank you, sincerely.”

She blows a kiss, and then withdraws, and Shane watches with a sinking feeling as the sunlight is blocked out by the slow lowering of the stone slab, until the only light that’s left to them is Ryan’s torch.

Ryan, who is standing frozen next to him, eyes on the slithering mass around their feet. Shane had forgotten this part of him — the fear, the way it takes his body over. He has a moment off far-too-late anxiety, thinking of Ryan in temples without Shane, without anyone to pull him out of it.

Back when they’d been together, Shane had always helped him around the edges of his fear by mocking it and making him laugh; but things feel too tender, and he doesn’t know if he can do it the right way, anymore. If he can do it without real meanness sneaking in, even knowing what he knows. It’s been too long.

So instead, he thinks: _Problem-solve, Madej._

“If the snakes are alive, and I think we can agree they are,” he thinks out loud, “then they have to come from somewhere. These snakes aren’t a millennium old. And if there’s a way in — ”

“There’s a way out,” Ryan agrees, grim. He gives his head a little shake and seems to collect himself a little. Shane feels a spark of pride, that he hasn’t quite lost his touch. “The way out is probably lined with snakes, but. Better to die by snakebite out there than in here, I guess.”

“Well, you never know. In a thousand years, when they dig us up, they might think we’re worth something.”

“We’re worth something now,” Ryan tells him, voice soft, the firelight from his torch flicking shadows across his face. For a moment, all the years melt away, and he looks twenty-three, bright-eyed and so dear to Shane that it makes his chest ache.

Shane nudges him. “That’s the spirit. Ol’ Bright Side Bergara, they call you.”

Ryan barks out a laugh and relaxes, a little. He glances at Shane and gives helpless-looking shrug. Shane gives his shoulder a squeeze, and together they start moving toward the walls, looking for cracks that light and serpents might get through.

“I thought I was Biceps Bergara,” Ryan says.

“You can be both,” Shane grants generously. “Bright Side Biceps Bergara: The Optimist’s Muscleman.”

“Jesus Christ, dude,” Ryan wheezes, and knocks their shoulders together. Then he stops walking. “Shane, look.”

He points his torch at one of the walls, riddled with holes. Snakes are dropping out of them like teardrops, falling with a hiss to the floor. Shane doesn’t see any light spilling in, but that doesn’t matter; they’re far enough underground that it might just mean it’s a long way up.

He puts his hands on the flat of the wall, leaving Ryan with the torch, feeling for weak points. “Snakes are actually pretty gentle creatures, for the most part,” he says conversationally. “There was one that lived in my folks’ barn, in Schaumburg. Or I mean, he lived in the walls. He’d come and go sometimes. When it got cold at night we’d sometimes find him curled up under the heater. I named him Gordon.”

“Of course you did,” Ryan says, voice dry and suddenly farther away than Shane was expecting. “Hey, Shane? I’m going to do something kind of stupid, but it’s going to work. I just need you to run, no matter what happens to me.”

Shane frowns, turning back from the wall and finding the space where Ryan had been empty. His eyes seek out the light from the torch and he finds it on top of the beast statue whose foundation Shane had leapt on earlier.

“Jesus, how did you — what are you, a fucking monkey?” he splutters. “How did you get up there so fast?”

Ryan huffs a laugh. “I do this kind of thing a lot,” he reminds Shane. “It’s my job. Now look out.”

“Look _out_?” Shane repeats, as Ryan starts to rock his legs back and forth, loosening where the statue’s base is attached to its foundation. He gets it, suddenly: Ryan is going to use the statue as a battering ram, taking down the wall.

It’s smart. It’s good problem solving.

It’s incredibly dangerous.

“Ryan,” Shane says, voice getting swept up into the loud groan of stone coming loose. “Ryan! Stop! We can figure out a better way to do this than to risk your — ”

The statue comes loose and tips forward toward the wall. Shane dives out of the way and covers his head as something smashes above him, a rain of dust landing on the back of his neck. He climbs, coughing, to his feet, calling Ryan’s name but getting no answer.

Shane scrambles up the statue and through the broken wall, heart in his throat. “Ryan? Come on, Bergara, I didn’t come all the way to Cairo to lose you in a fucking _statue surfing_ accident, that’s — unacceptably stupid. Absolutely out of the question.”

 _If you’re not dead I’m going to kill you_ , he adds silently, because he doesn’t want to discourage Ryan from responding.

At the mouth of the new, Ryan-made entrance, Shane meets a room full of skeletons, snakes winding in and out of their various orifices, like something out of a horror novel. He feels shaky from not knowing where Ryan is — not dead, of course not dead, but knocked out, maybe.

“Sorry to disrupt the party,” Shane tells the skeletons. “It looks like you were having a real laugh-riot here in this palace of fucking nightmares but I am actually looking for my fr — WHAT the fuck!”

He yanks his hand away from where something has slid onto it, then settles immediately as Ryan cackles. “Sorry, dude, sorry,” he says. “I genuinely wasn’t trying to fuck with you.”

“Fuck _you,_ Bergara,” Shane hisses, but collects Ryan’s hand again, holding it tight and letting Ryan lead him into the dark of the tunnel. He thinks that he can see a light in the distance, worries that in the silence of the tomb, Ryan can hear the hammering of his heart. “Jesus. I thought you — that was so fucking stupid, Ryan. We could have figured out another way.”

“But my way was faster,” Ryan points out.

“Not necessarily! You don’t know what my way was!”

“Okay, what was your way?”

“... As yet unclear,” Shane admits. “But I’d have thought of one, and it would have been better than yours.”

Ryan wheezes a soft laugh as they come to the end of the tunnel. Light is peering around the edges of one of the stones, loose in its bed.

Ryan pulls his hand away slowly, regretfully, and then both of them push against the loose stone with everything they have. It shifts slowly at first, then more easily as it moves, until it tumbles out into the sand and sunlight pours in, fresh air sweeping through Shane’s grateful lungs.

He only realizes that he’s grinning when he looks at Ryan grinning back at him. His heart thunders in his chest, bright and well-lit, a rush of adrenaline pushing him to leap up into the opening and out of the temple, offering a hand to Ryan to help him along.

He knows it’s just chemicals threading through his brain, enzymes reacting to the stress and the relief, but — looking at Ryan in the sunlight, dirt and blood smudged across his face, teeth too-white and shining, Shane feels suddenly overwhelmed by how glad he is to be looking at him. To have him here, close, alive and looking at Shane the way he always had, the way Shane had been too young and scared to parse.

“Let them have the Ark,” Shane blurts. “I don’t care. Let’s just — fuck it, Ryan, I don’t care about the money.”

Ryan’s face softens and the light in his eyes dims a little. “I can’t,” he says quietly, eyes flicking over Shane’s shoulder to the tarmac, where a plane is waiting. The woman who’d stolen from them is sitting in a Jeep, watching the Ark be carried toward a transport vehicle. “Shane, I know you don’t believe that the Ark has power, but I do, and the people that woman is going to sell it to — they believe it, too, and they want to use it. They want to use it to do really, really bad things.”

The good feeling drains out of Shane and he remembers why they are here in the first place, the unsolvable problem between them.

He sighs. He thinks Ryan might be crazy and he absolutely believes the woman trying to be some kind of biblical weapons dealer is crazy, but he knows that particular set of Ryan’s jaw and he knows that Ryan isn’t going to change his mind.

It’s bravery for no real reason, but bravery nonetheless. Ryan has always been good at doing the things that scare him.

“Fuuuuuck,” Shane grumbles. “Fine. Okay. Let’s — go stop that fucking airplane, I guess.”

Ryan beams at him.

—

“When the Ark gets loaded, we need to already be on the plane,” Ryan tells him, crouched low behind stacks of cargo. Shane fights off a very ill-timed and inappropriate stab of heat, watching Ryan’s eyes dart around the airfield, strategizing. He’s always liked watching Ryan be good at things, and he’s _good_ at this. He’s had, Shane guesses, a lot of practice.

“Okay,” Shane agrees. “Sure. What’s a little hijacking between friends?”

Ryan gives him a dry look. “Stay here,” he commands. Shane nods agreeably, with absolutely no plans to obey, but it’s nice to let Ryan thinks he’s won an argument now and then. Ryan straightens up, jogging toward the plane and climbing up on its back end, where the pilot can’t see him. He doesn’t get far before he’s noticed, by an almost cartoonishly massive man, who looks like he’s just been peeled right out of a comic book about professional boxing.

Ryan takes a look at him and immediately looks tired, holding up a weary hand and gesturing for him to wait as he slides down the plane. He holds up his fists in a somewhat half-hearted gesture, then points at the ground and aims a kick directly for the boxer’s groin.

It’s ... not particularly effective.

“’Atta boy,” Shane says, and then notices the pilot pulling out what looks to be a luger and aiming it at Ryan’s head. He scrambles quickly up the plane, pulling the wheel blocks with him and using them as a lasso to knock the pilot out.

This seems like a great idea until he falls forward onto the control panel and the plane starts moving forward, the cabin door snapping shut.

Shane does not know how to fly a plane.

He glances forward. There’s a gunner seat. Shane _does_ not know to fire a gun.

He grabs its control and shifts its aim toward the truck full of weapons dealers aiming weapons at them, shooting somewhat blindly at the truck. Shane doesn’t particularly like shooting people. He barely likes hitting them, if he’s honest, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do.

His attention is caught by the sudden smell of diesel: Shane whips his head around and realizes that the gasoline transport tanker has been sliced open by one of the plane’s wings.

“Well, fuck,” he says. “That’s not great.”

Ryan shouts, “Shane!”

When twists in the seat just in time to see the propellers take out the boxer, blood smattering against the glass.

“Oh, very gross,” he mutters, and then slams his fist against the window, yelling to be heard above the engine: “Ryan! It’s stuck!”

“Get out of the plane!” Ryan answers, unhelpfully. “The gas!”

“Thank you, Ryan, that’s incredibly helpful advice,” Shane shouts back. “It’s _stuck_!”

Ryan jumps up onto the back of the plane’s wing and walks unsteadily toward the cockpit, made shaky by the force of the wind. He gestures for Shane to move as far from his side of the glass as he can; pulling his gun from its holster, he aims it at the window hitch. “Shoot it!” Shane yells.

“I’m going to shoot it!” Ryan yells back, not hearing him. Shane covers his ears and Ryan takes the shot; the door pops open and Ryan swings it up, yanking Shane out by his arm. They slide down the back of the plane and as soon as his feet hit the dirt, they run. Shane feels himself grinning, despite the danger, despite the incredible roar of the explosion behind them; he feels a weird kind of victory pumping through him.

 _It’s called adrenaline and too much of it makes you go crazy_ , he reminds himself as Ryan drags him into a nearby tent. The space is too small, the light low, and Ryan is so close that Shane can almost taste his breath.

In the dark, Ryan drags him forward and seals their mouths together, hands threading through Shane’s hair, holding him tight.

It’s better than their kiss in the tavern, and the adrenaline makes Shane’s whole body light up, pushing insistently forward until they stumble into one of the support poles. They’re going to bring the tent down around them if they don’t pay attention, but Shane doesn’t _want_ to pay attention, he wants to fuck Ryan into the ground.

“Okay, you are both _so_ nasty,” says Curly’s voice from the entrance of the tent. “I was feeling so glad to find you both alive and you had to ruin it by being horny and inconsiderate.”

Shane pulls away. Ryan won’t quite look at him.

“We blew up the Ark,” he says, as if just realizing.

Shane keeps his eyes trained on Curly, pulling his hands back into his lap and clasping them together to keep them from disobeying him again and dragging Ryan back to him. “You didn’t,” Curly says. “It’s been loaded into a truck to take it back to Cairo.”

They look at one another. “A truck?” Ryan repeats.

“Which one?” asks Shane.

Curly opens the tent flap a little and points. “That one.”

Shane knows without asking that Ryan is going to go after the truck, and that there is very little Shane can do to stop him. He was like this even before, unable to let go of something once he’d sunk his teeth into it.

“Shane, I need you to go back to Cairo,” Ryan says. “Secure us transportation to London. Boat, plane, anything.”

“Curly can do that,” Shane argues. “I’m coming with you.”

“Curly doesn’t have the money, and even if he did have the money, he doesn’t have any way to get you a passport if you aren’t with him,” Ryan points out. “Shane, I’ll be fine.”

Shane’s stomach twists, because Ryan is right. Without a passport, Shane won’t get past any European customs the way he had the ones in Cairo by pretending to be stupid and unprepared and totally unable to speak Arabic. They’ll need to be able to leave as soon as possible.

“Fuck,” he mutters. “What are you going to do?”

Ryan shrugs. “I don’t know, I’m making this up as I go,” he admits, and then, with a final glance at Curly, presses forward to stamp a kiss on Shane’s mouth. I’ll meet you back at Omar’s.”

Shane watches him sprint from the tent. He’s bleeding from his mouth, has cuts and bruises along his chin.

If it’s the last time he ever sees him, at least this time he’ll have watched him go.

—

Curly’s friend in the consulate promises the passport will be ready by closing time, after they’ve paid the extremely exorbitant “expedited passport fee,” which Shane is 99% sure goes directly into his pocket. He doesn’t care; there’s a boat arranged, space secured through one of Curly’s shadier contacts, and all he has to do now is wait.

“He’ll be fine,” Curly tells him, almost kindly. “Ryan’s good at this. He does it all the time.”

“Interestingly, that doesn’t make feel better even a little bit,” Shane grouses. He hates feeling useless, so he’s cutting a fig into progressively smaller pieces. Curly keeps snatching cuts and popping them into his mouth.

“So you’re back on the Rytrain, I surmise? Traveling the Bergara Beltway? And before you lie to me, please remember that not _two hours ago_ I witnessed you trying to crawl into his mouth.”

“Okay,” Shane says, pointing the knife at him, “whatever may or may not be happening with between myself and Ryan, I need us all to agree that we’re not calling it the Bergara Beltway.”

Curly laughs. For the first time, Shane thinks it doesn’t sound combative; even the look he gives him as he steals another piece of fig is almost fond. “You know, I can see why he likes you,” he muses. At Shane’s surprised eyebrows, he makes a face. “Not for _me_ , _God_ no. But for him. Ryan likes to feel challenged. He needs somebody who will push back against all his incredibly stupid ideas.”

“Oh my God, they’re so stupid,” Shane agrees. “Did you know he really believes in ghosts? Like — he thinks chipmunks can turn into ghosts, because they ‘have souls.’ He really said those exact words to me, once.”

“Well, the boy’s an optimist,” Curly indulges. “Anyway, all of this is to say that if you’re going to love him, love him. But if you’re not, don’t start. He was a tiny broken bird when I met him and I’ve just _barely_ gotten him back on his feet.”

Shane looks away. “You’re mixing your metaphors,” he grumbles, instead of answering.

“Does it seem like I give a shit?” Curly asks.

The door to Omar’s swings open.

“See?” Ryan says, swaying a little. “Told you I’d be fine. Nothing but a few cuts and bruises.”

—

It’s more than a few cuts and bruises, as it turns out.

They’d pulled Ryan inside of Omar’s and sat him down, Curly thunking a tankard of beer in front of him and Shane poking worriedly at the bruise under his eye. Ryan had said a series of sentences that his tone seemed to indicate were normal and believable: he had chased the trunk carrying the Ark, on a horse. He had jumped off the horse, onto the truck. He had fought the driver, knocked him out, and taken over the truck. At some point, one of the cars chasing him had driven off a cliff, and Ryan had simply driven the Ark back to Cairo, praying he wouldn’t run into any checkpoints or police.

“Shane doubted, but me, I did not,” Curly had told him, beaming and kissing his cheek four times. “And we have arranged a boat. We even got your friend a passport, no need to thank me but you _are_ welcome.” He made a face at Shane, who was kissing the top of TJ’s head as he transferred her to Curly’s shoulder, feeling misty about saying goodbye. “I was almost getting to like you. Not a lot, don’t get excited, but if this works out, you can come along next time.”

Now, Shane sits with Ryan on the edge of the bed in the cabin, delighted by the silk pajamas Curly had procured for them both, loose and soft against his skin. Shane hasn’t worn anything this nice in a long time; back in Kathmandu he mostly just slept in whatever he’d worn that day, too tired after closing up to even bother getting naked.

He dabs at Ryan’s wounds with a wet cloth and can’t keep from clucking irritably at him. There are scars on Ryan’s shoulders, markings on his back, that Shane knows he must have gotten from similar acts of astounding stupidity, with no one there to reign in his dumber impulses. Shane has been trying not to look too hard, because he knows the second he does he’ll get distracted. “All of these are essentially self-inflicted,” he says. “So don’t make that face at me. These are called consequences, and they often follow actions. It’s a fascinating concept that perhaps has not yet made it up the ivory tower of academia.”

“I know what consequences are,” Ryan snaps. “Don’t lecture me, dude. I’m too fucking tired to be lectured and everything fucking hurts. I just want to sleep.”

“Were you always this much of a baby?” Shane asks. “Because in my recollections of you, I gotta say, you were tougher.”

“Shut up, Shane, I’m — _old_ now.”

“Yeah, you’re ancient. Dry Bones Bergara.”

“Dude, how many fucking nicknames are you sitting on? Do you want to just get them all out at one time? Because — ow! Jesus, be _care_ fu— ”

“Oh, does this hurt?”

“ _Ow_! Fuck! _Yes_ — ”

“Well goddamnit, Ryan, where _doesn’t_ it hurt?” Shane cries, exasperated. He pulls his hands away and waits, glaring down at where Ryan is laid out below him, face scrunched up and irritated.

Rolling his eyes, Ryan lifts his elbow and points at it. “Here,” he says flatly. “My elbows are doing great. Thanks for asking.”

He looks so grumpy and rumpled and petulant, and without thinking about it, Shane leans down and presses his mouth to the rough curve of his elbow, tasting sweat and dirt. Everything slows down, suddenly, once Shane realizes what he’s doing, and he snaps back into his body.

He pulls away, slowly, eyes flicking up to meet Ryan’s. He’s gone completely still, staring up at Shane with wide eyes, not even breathing.

“And — ” he murmurs tentatively, lifting his other hand to point at his head, just beneath the stupid hat that has somehow, almost impossibly, stayed on his head for the duration of their adventure. “And ... here.”

Shane pauses for a moment. The air between them feels tense and heavy, and in the back of his mind he can hear a tiny voice shouting at him to sit up, to get off the bed, to leave the room, to leap off the side of the boat, to swim into the ocean and never turn around. The sensible part of him, the part that got him from Pokhara to Kathmandu, that bought हिममानव and helped it thrive, is screaming that this is stupid. Letting himself get pulled back into Ryan’s orbit is stupid.

Even Curly had thought so, and as far as Shane could tell Curly would love it if Shane spent every day in emotional turmoil. _If you’re going to love him, love him. But if you’re not, don’t start._

Okay: yes. They loved each other once, a long, long time ago. But Shane is not who he was then. _Ryan_ is not who he was, and not who Shane thought, and it would be absolute madness to throw away eleven years of very slow reconstruction of Shane’s own cardiac processing. It would be, just, monumentally idiotic. Completely and utterly —

He lifts off Ryan’s hat and tosses it to the side, stamping a kiss to the place on his forehead where his fingers are pressed.

“And here,” Ryan murmurs, mouth so close to Shane’s face that he can feel him breathing, pointing at his lips.

Everything feels tremulously close to breaking open: their history, the universe, Shane’s heart.

He leans down and presses his mouth to Ryan’s, giving all of it up at once.

Ryan makes a sound, hand snaking up over Shane’s shoulder, his arm hooking over the back of Shane’s neck and pulling him downward, anchoring him there like he’s afraid Shane is going to disappear. Shane lets himself be moved. He drags his hand up from the bed to rest flat on Ryan’s belly, just to feel him breathing, to feel him warm and alive and _here_ , right here, with Shane.

Ryan’s mouth feels just like Shane remembers it: quick and hungry, lips always insisting that Shane pay them close attention. He’s stubbled from days of not shaving and it scratches half-pleasantly, half-irritatingly at Shane’s chin. His drew hand slides around Shane’s back and fists in the satin of his pajama shirt.

Shane tries to draw back, but Ryan won’t let him go. He pulls his legs up so that his knees are on either side of Shane’s torso, and then hooks his ankles together.

“Ryan,” Shane manages, half-laughing. “What’s your _plan,_ here?”

“I’m — holding on,” Ryan mutters, almost sheepish but mostly just stubborn. “I know your brain is going to kick in and you’re going to get up and walk away and I’m — I don’t want you to.”

Shane softens. He presses his hand against Ryan’s cheek and kisses him again, this time more gently. “Ryan, I give you my sincere promise that there are very, very few things that could draw my attention away, right now, and almost all of them are apocalyptic events.”

“What’s the one that isn’t?”

“Irrefutable evidence of ghosts.”

Ryan laughs, and Shane can feel him relaxing. His feet fall back to the bed and he lets Shane shift back far enough that they aren’t looking cross-eyed at one another.

Shane has — well, he didn’t _not_ think about it. He tried not to dwell. But sex with Ryan had always been good, had always felt like an argument in the best way, their bodies goading one another to progressively taller heights.

Now, Ryan spread out below him, Shane feels spoiled for choice. He’s hit with so many sense memories at once that he doesn’t know where to start.

“Why are you still so hot?” he grumbles, irritated. “Like what kind of salacious operation is UCLA running? This is untoward. It’s un _professional_.”

Ryan flushes. Shane remembers, suddenly, how much being looked at embarrassed him, how he loved and was agonized by attention at the same time. “Shane,” he laughs, eyes cutting away. “Stop looking at me and _do_ something.”

But Shane doesn’t want to. Or: Shane desperately wants to, but he doesn’t want to do it now that Ryan’s told him to.

“Does it seem to you like you are in a position to be giving orders, Bergara?” he asks, pushing the flat of his hand down onto Ryan’s sternum, enough pressure to be a warning. He wants to tie him down, an impulse so obviously tied to keeping Ryan from disappearing again that he’s almost disappointed in the unoriginality of his own psyche. Instead, he pins Ryan’s hands up above his head and wraps his fingers around the spikes of the headboard. “Leave them there,” he commands.

He’s not going to keep Ryan where he doesn’t want to be, but he wants him to want to be _here._

Ryan’s breath catches in his throat, and he nods.

Shane lowers his head and sucks a kiss on the place where Ryan’s neck meets his shoulder, then to his collarbone, then to the divet between his pecs. Ryan hitches up, his dick sliding helplessly against the satin of both their pajama bottoms. He gives an irritated grumble, which Shane silences with a look.

He moves his mouth to Ryan’s nipple, biting down just enough to make Ryan shift beneath him, and then draws in a long, slow suckle, until Ryan is pushing up into his mouth instead of drawing away.

Shane remembers more than he realized about how to make Ryan feel good. It feels like artifact-hunting to find it: the puzzles of how his body works, the slow and inexorable trek toward getting what Shane is looking for.

With his hand, he rubs tight circles around Ryan’s other nipple, never quite touching it and never letting up on the one in his mouth.

“Shane,” Ryan groans, body chasing the wheel of Shane’s thumb. “Fuck you, come on.”

Shane rewards his impatience by swiping his thumb over the nub. Ryan gives a sharp inhale and arches up into Shane’s hand, stomach going tight. Shane pulls away. It’s mean, he knows, to hover, to be so close but not where Ryan wants him.

He swipes his thumb again.

“Shane I will _kill you_ ,” Ryan hisses, and Shane watched his arms twitch, torn between wanting to let go and wanting to be good. He keeps holding onto the bed, looking at Shane with an expression of rumpled outrage.

“If you kill me it’s gonna make for a real weird blowjob,” Shane muses, and drags his hand down Ryan’s stomach to the lip of his pajama bottoms. “Unless you’ve gotten a _lot_ kinkier in the last decade.”

Ryan drops his head back on the pillow. “I always knew you were a demon.”

“Ohhh, a sex demon, that’s fun,” Shane muses, delighted. He tugs Ryan’s pajamas down and pulls his dick free, dragging a finger up the side but not giving Ryan any of the pressure he wants. “Aw, hey little buddy. It’s been a while. How’ve you been?”

“ _Please_ do not call my dick _little buddy,_ oh my God.”

“Big Buddy? Appropriately-Sized Buddy? Oh — Penis Pal?”

Ryan begins knocking his head against the headboard. “This is not how I imagined our first time back together going,” he says.

Shane wraps his hand around the base of Ryan’s dick and gives it a gentle squeeze, then pushes his thumb up the underside with steady, insistent pressure. Ryan blows out a long, shaky breath.

“And what exactly did you imagine, Ryan?” Shane asks, pulling up and then pushing back down, drawing a groan out of Ryan like unraveling  a ribbon. He stays slow, unhurried, waiting until precome leaks out of the head of Ryan’s dick and using it coat the shaft, easing the glide.

“A lot more tearing of cloth and a lot less psychological torture,” Ryan manages after a moment, voice shaky. “I anticipated being really embarrassed about soon it was over.”

Shane shakes his head. It’s weird that his hand feels like it recognizes the weight of Ryan’s dick, muscle memory reminding him of how Ryan likes to be touched. He slides his under hand under Ryan’s balls to press against his perineum, and Ryan mutters, “Fuuu _uuuuuuck._ ”

“I don’t want it to be over soon,” Shane admits, surprising himself with the honesty in his voice.

 _I don’t want it to be over ever_ , he thinks.

When he looks up,  Ryan is gazing at him with an expression that Shane can’t bear. It’s — a lot, too much, and suddenly he doesn’t want to torture Ryan anymore, doesn’t want to be aloof and in charge anymore.

He doesn’t want either one of them to spend another second waiting.

He shifts down quickly, giving Ryan no warning, and gets his mouth around the head. He sucks once before sliding further down, flattening his tongue to give Ryan the extra underside friction that he’s always loved. He feels dizzy with how familiar it is, and how different at the same time: he’s unpracticed, can’t take it all at once the way he used to be able to; he has to work his way up to it, keeping his hand gripped at the base. He can feel the rumble of whatever stupid sound is forcing its way out of Ryan’s throat, and it makes something coil up in the pit of his belly.

“Shane,” Ryan chants, “Shane, Shane, Shane, Shane, Shane.”

Shane remembers: _I didn’t say your name for such a long time._

He takes his hand away and goes all the way down, until Ryan’s dick kisses the back of his throat. He looks up, because Ryan has gone silent.

Ryan is gazing down at him with a stunned expression, eyes wide and warm and liquid, though whether that’s tears or a trick of the light, Shane doesn’t know. His hands are still gripping the headboard. Still choosing to be here. Still choosing Shane.

“Shane,” he chokes out.

Shane looks away, bobbing faster, determined to make Ryan — _remember_ , how good they were, how well they worked. The hand not propping him up presses up behind Ryan’s balls and slides back, toward his asshole, pushing against it but not pushing in.

Ryan — _yelps_ , and comes down Shane’s throat, which eases the pained clench in Shane’s heart, even though it’s rude.

He eases back, ears ringing loudly enough that it takes him a second to clock Ryan saying, “Let me touch you. Shane. Shane, pay attention, can I let go, can I — _please_ can I get my hands on your — ”

“Yeah,” Shane croaks, and rolls over as Ryan scrambles toward him, dragging Shane up to kiss him messily, licking into his mouth like he wants to taste himself there.

“Gross,” Shane says, though it’s badly muffled by Ryan’s insistent mouth.

“Don’t kinkshame me,” Ryan scolds, and then is reaching down to shove at Shane’s pajamas, hand wrapping around his dick. He lets out a long, relieved sigh, like he’s found something he’d thought was lost. “God, Shane — _Shane_ , you’re still so fucking good at that, what the fuck, I thought I was probably remembering with rose-colored glasses but I wasn’t, Jesus Christ.”

Shane laughs. His throat is a little sore, but in a kind of pleasantly buzzed way; he leans his forehead against Ryan’s and pushes up into his hand, his firm and steady grip, each stroke a reminder that he is here.

He is _here_.

Both of them, after all this time, impossibly, are nowhere else but here.

“Shane,” Ryan says again. “Come on, man. It’s okay. Come on.”

He nudges is forehead up so he can meet Shane’s eyes, grinning that big stupid Bergara grin, and Shane gives up thinking anything at all as he comes into Ryan’s hand. Ryan slows down, but doesn’t stop until Shane is twitching away, overstimulated, and then he watches dimly as Ryan brings his come-covered hand to his mouth and licks it clean.

“Gross,” Shane says again, in a punched-out voice that very much belies that he thinks this.

Ryan grins like he’s not fooled. “It tastes just like I remember.”

“Don’t pretend my come tastes unique,” Shane laughs, slumping forward to rest his head against Ryan’s shoulder. “That’s very romantic, Ryan, but it’s a biological fallacy and you’re full of shit.”

He can feel his eyes wrinkling fondly as Ryan makes a scandalized sound, tugging Shane so that he can arrange him how he wants on the bed: Shane flat on his back and Ryan flopped happily on top of him, head on Shane’s chest, ear pressed to the place where Shane’s heart beats loudest.

“Well, I guess we’re — still good at this,” Shane muses. “That’s good to know.”

Ryan huffs his agreement tiredly, fingers curling around Shane’s far wrist and just ... holding onto it. Shane takes a moment to study him, the new lines in his face. He can see Ryan’s brain whirring, the anxiety of having Shane and losing him, of not knowing exactly where he stands. Ryan has never liked loose ends.

But Shane can’t — he can’t tell Ryan where to stand, yet. He doesn’t know, either.

“You didn’t used to be so reckless,” he murmurs carefully after a moment, instead of letting Ryan work himself up to asking about what this means, about what Shane wants, because Shane doesn’t have any answers.

Ryan gives a painful-looking shrug, keeping his eyes trained everywhere but Shane’s face. Shane is oddly grateful: it feels more possible to talk about this when he is focused only on where their hands are twined, looking at the physical reality of his body instead of trying to peer into his head.

“Well,” Ryan begins, voice scratchy, “I guess I got used to ... without you, I.” He cuts off, clearly rolling his next words around on his tongue, choosing them carefully.

Shane waits.

“I worked a lot, once — you were gone,” Ryan decides eventually. “I didn’t have anything else. I just ... I did whatever stupid thing I had to do to get the artifact because there have only ever been two things I thought were worth anything at all: archaeology, and you.” He takes a long breath. “And ... I’d lost you, so.”

“You didn’t _lose_ me,” Shane reminds him, voice sharp. He wants to be soft, but Ryan keeps on stubbornly running into all his rough edges. “You — left me behind. It was a _choice._ ”

Ryan sighs, a long and tired sound. “Yeah, but would you have _listened_ to me, Shane?” he asks. “Do you really think you’d have taken me seriously if I said not to touch the idol, or any of the other things we found? You think you _wouldn’t_ have tried to to prove to me that I was being stupid by fucking — juggling it or something?”

Shane closes his eyes. The truth is that Ryan is right. Of course Shane, twenty-three and full of unearned confidence, would have dedicated all his energy to proving Ryan wrong. To proving himself right.

But he isn’t sure how to forgive Ryan’s sincerity of belief and all it made him do when he _still thinks_ that the belief is stupid.

“No,” he admits. “I mean, I wouldn’t have juggled it. It’s a priceless artifact, Ryan, and  I’m not a juggling professional.”

“I kept going over it in my head,” Ryan barges on, ignoring the joke. “All those years, I kept — trying to figure out what I could have done differently. How I could have kept you safe without — giving you up, but I ... I never thought of anything. Shane, I _still_ can’t think of anything.”

He tightens his grip on Shane’s hand as he says it, as if afraid the words themselves are going to dissolve Shane out from under him. To soothe him, Shane twists his arm until his palm is face up, and clasps Ryan’s wrist so that they’re holding onto one another, hands gripped like promises.

He doesn’t have the answer, either.

Instead of trying to find one, he squeezes his hand and draws Ryan in closer, letting the lull of the ship’s movement and the dying candlelight create a soft cocoon around them. Here, exactly here, in this moment, on this bed, Shane doesn’t need an answer. He doesn’t need anything. He’s happy exactly as he is.

Shane tips forward and kisses the top of Ryan’s hair.  “The reason I named my bar Bigfoot,” he admits, voice soft and light, “is because I lied to you, before.”

“You gotta stop doing that,” Ryan answers, sleepy. “You’re going to give me trust issues.” He shifts slightly to squint up at Shane’s face. “What did you lie about? Oh my God, is this it? Is this the moment that you tell me you really are a Bigfoot?”

“I am a _human being_ ,” Shane insists, laughing. “And no. I named it Bigfoot as a reminder of you, because I was lying when I said I got over it. I never even got close.”

It matters that Ryan has loved him, Shane thinks; that Ryan has carried Shane the way that Shane has loved and carried Ryan.

It means something. Shane doesn’t know what. But something.

Ryan smiles at him so widely that the whole room brightens.

—

Shane wakes to the sound of a gun’s safety flicking off.

Ryan is gone.

“I feel like every time this happens to me, the circumstances get exponentially worse,” Shane says aloud. “First it was just a breakup, then it was a robbery, and now there’s a gun in my face.”

The American woman, whose face has become distressingly familiar given that Shane still doesn’t know her name, frowns deeply at him. “What?”

“He’s being dramatic,” Ryan’s voice says. The American woman shifts aside and Shane sees him, tied up and seated on the floor, looking furiously up at his captors. “It wasn’t a _robbery_ , it was ... protective requisitioning.”

“We found Mister Bergara waiting quite patiently for us,” the woman tells Shane. “He was quite adamant that you not be parted.”

“That was noble of him.” Shane shifts his eyes from the American to Ryan. “He could have tried to get help, or escape and then come rescue me later.”

“I didn’t — ” Ryan looks away, embarrassed. “I didn’t want you to wake up alone and think I’d left you,” he mutters.

Shane’s heart swells, despite the situation. “You’re still such a fucking idiot,” he says, and means _I still love you._

The thought takes him by surprise, so sure of itself that it knocks the breath out of Shane’s lungs. _Shit_ , he thinks, appalled at himself for his bad timing and his stupid, devoted heart.

The woman barks out a small laugh and lowers the gun slightly, giving Shane an appraising look. “Shane Madej,” she muses. “I read your thesis, on the significance of ceremony in religious practice. You made some interesting points with regard to the importance of ritual in imbuing objects with power.”

“To be clear, I meant the power people _bestow on_ objects,” Shane says, still looking at Ryan, who’s looking back with a bewildered look on his face. _I still love you_ , he thinks again, as if he thinks it enough times Ryan will be able to hear him. “It’s just belief, not _actual_ power. Not _magic_. Ryan could never wrap his head around that distinction, either.”

“I can wrap my head around the _concept_ , asshole,” Ryan pipes up. “I just think you’re _wrong_. Factually.”

“You can’t say ‘factually’ when you are talking about _magic_ , those two things are _diametrically opposed_ ,” Shane scolds him, and feels his mouth curling up, his heart going bright. He has a gun trained on his head and they’re both probably going to die and Shane’s idiot heart is swollen with joy.

The woman rolls her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose with the hand not holding her gun. “ _Nevertheless_ ,” she interrupts them pointedly, “it was a shrewd argument.”

“Thanks. I’d let my thesis advisor know, but I’m pretty sure you murdered him.”

“Professor Yang?” she asks, looking almost surprised. She waves a dismissive hand. “I didn’t kill him. Well, I _sent_ someone to kill him, but he was already dead. Or at least it looked that way, if the state of his apartment was any indication. Otherwise he was into some deeply disturbing sexual bloodplay.”

“To be fair, weird sex stuff wouldn’t be _that far_ out of Yang’s wheelhouse.”

She laughs again and tucks the gun into her holster. Shane tries not to let his relief be visible. “I like you, Mister Madej,” she tells him. “And I think you’re going to be useful to me.”

Shane swallows. “Is there an Option B?” he asks.

She gestures ominously toward her holstered gun. “There is always an Option B.”

“Option A it is,” says Shane. “Let me just get dressed.”

—

Shane sits in the American’s cabin on the boat they’d overtaken the ship from, sipping coffee as they make their way to a nearby island. He was separated from Ryan after they’d boarded the other ship, because their bickering had apparently not been as fun to listen to as it was to participate in. Shane doesn’t think they’re going to kill Ryan; he thinks they think they need him, for some reason.

It’s not entirely clear to him what they think they need _Shane_ for, but whatever it is, it means he’s not dead yet.

He’s discovered that the woman’s name is Renee, and her odd syntax comes from being half-French. He’s discovered that she, too, loves popcorn. He’s discovered that she makes her money by selling weapons at extraordinarily high prices to extraordinarily bad people.

She seems to believe that the Ark is such a weapon; Shane had told her honestly that this believe was stupid, but she, like Ryan, had shrugged him off.

He’s sitting with his ankle on his knee, listening her talk about how much she can charge for an artifact like this and trying not to panic.

“So you do not believe,” she muses, looking him over. “Not even a little? Nothing you have seen in all those temples has opened you up to the possibility that there is more on this earth than your science can comprehend? Nothing shown to you by Mister Bergara has shifted your perspective?”

Shane doesn’t answer. He raises his eyebrows.

After a long moment, she sighs. “ _Doctor_ Bergara,” she amends.

Shane knows she’s looking for a nuanced answer, but she very recently kidnapped him and is maybe going to murder both him and his — Ryan, so he’s not feeling too disposed to giving her what she wants.

“No,” he says.

She shakes her head, clucking sadly. “How terribly boring life must seem to you.”

Shane thinks about being twenty-three. He thinks about the way his chest had felt pried open and emptied out, when he realized Ryan was gone. He thinks about हिममानव, and Professor Yang, and the smell of old books, the taste of rashki, the weight of idols. He thinks about being alive only once, and managing to find Ryan twice within that lifetime, despite all the stupid and human things between them. These things aren’t magic, but they have the vitality that believers seek.

It isn’t boring to think that life is fleeting and singular, Shane thinks; it’s beautiful.

“Well, I’m currently being held hostage by pirates,” he points out, “so in terms of excitement I think I do okay.”

Renee laughs. She shakes her head despairingly and rises, going to peer out her window. “We’re here,” she says, and holds up a piece of rope. “My apologies, Mister Madej, but I’m afraid I really must take precautions.”

Shane shrugs and holds out his wrists to let her bind them, following her once she has finished to the deck. Ryan is there waiting, surrounded by his own team of guards, and the naked relief on his face at seeing Shane makes Shane smile despite his growing sense that this might genuinely be his last afternoon on earth.

They disembark together, following the Ark. Ryan murmurs, “You okay? Did they hurt you?”

“I’m fine. You?”

Ryan shrugs. “I’ll be honest, I’ve had better days.” He turns his head and meets Shane’s eyes, expression serious. “I’m sorry I got you into this. I tried — everything that happened was to prevent this exact thing, and here we are anyway.”

Shane laughs, despite himself, and the sound catches wetly in his throat. “Hey, we all die eventually,” he points out. “At least I’m not going to die in Schaumburg.”

He leans his shoulder into Ryan’s, just to feel him, steady and present beside him. They stay that way all the way until they reach the cave that Renee has chosen for the unveiling, and when they are tied back to back to a pole, Ryan turns his wrists and clasps Shane’s hands.

“Shane,” he says, voice shaky. “There’s something — I know you don’t believe the Ark has power, but I do. And if — if I’m right, then ... this is my last chance to tell you that I — ”

 _Honor Yahweh, whose tabernacle this is_ , Shane thinks.

He doesn’t believe in magic, has never believed in magic, but he believes in Ryan.

He says: “If I believed, what would you tell me?”

“ ... What?”

Just a few feet away, Renee is almost skipping to where her minions have set the Ark down, pulling its black cover away to reveal the glint of its surface.

“When the Ark is open, I’ll let you boys have a look,” Renee calls to them cheerfully, pulling her dark hair back into a ponytail as she gazes hungrily down at the Ark’s golden lid. “But the first viewing is all mine.”

“ _If I believed_ ,” Shane repeats, more urgently. “What would you tell me to do to survive it?”

“‘You cannot see my face, for no one can see me and live,’” Ryan whispers, voice cracking. “But Shane. I’m not doing it if you don’t.”

Shane squeezes Ryan’s hand. Ryan, who believes so much that they are facing down death that he is trying to confess to something Shane already knows. Ryan, willing to die so that Shane doesn’t die alone.

Shane believes that all there is inside the Ark is stone and dust and sand and the hand of time reaching forward to the present, but what Shane has come to realize is that what he _believes_ is beside the point.

It matters what he _does_.

“Close your eyes, Ryan,” he says, calm. “Keep them closed, no matter what happens.”

Renee unceremoniously pushes the lid from its top, and just like that, the Ark is open.

—

This is what Shane knows: something happened.

There was heat, incredible, unbearable heat. Renee screamed. Ryan kept a grip on Shane’s hand and didn’t let go of it. The ropes burns from their wrists, but Shane’s skin felt strangely untouched, not even warm.

It was fast — probably less than a minute, maybe less than _half_ a minute, and when it was over the silence was so loud that Shane was worried he’d gone deaf. He was shaking and Ryan was shaking and then Ryan’s hands were on either side of his face and he was saying Shane’s name, voice cutting through the ringing as clearly as if it were coming from Shane’s own mouth.

“Shane. You closed your eyes. You really closed them. You — are you all right?” The words are full of wonder and gratitude and stupid, giddy relief.

“I’m — ” Shane chokes on the word _fine._ He tries to make sense of it, to make sense of any of it at all.

He can’t. Shane can’t say it was God and he can’t say it wasn’t just some ancient, airborne pathogen that had dispelled just enough by the time it reached them. He can’t say whether he’s witnessed a miracle or just a chemical reaction he can’t explain because Shane’s not a fucking scientist.

“Ryan,” he says, clinging to the one thing he _is_ sure of, one thing that the fire hadn’t burned away: “I’m still in love with you.”

Ryan’s eyes are wide but unpanicked. He’s still clutching Shane like he’s forgotten how to let go.

He says, “I — Jesus Christ, Shane.”

He says, “I love you, too. What the fuck.”

He says, voice warm, voice so full of fondness that it almost hurts Shane to hear it: “I can’t believe you closed your eyes.”

—

**_Epilogue_ **

“Shane,” Ryan says, poking him awake. His voice is giddy with the kind of punch-drunk excitement that tells Shane he has stayed awake all night downstairs in _Bigfoot’s Bar_ , spiraling down a rabbit hole of research. “Shane, wake up.”

“No,” Shane grumbles, rolling over onto his stomach. He grins into the pillow as Ryan flops down on top of him, nuzzling in behind his ear. “Ryan, the sun isn’t even up. This time is for _sleeping_.”

“But Shane,” Ryan murmurs, lips brushing up against Shane’s ear, “don’t you want to know what I found?”

Shane sighs. He gives in and rolls over, blinking in the darkness until his eyes adjust and Ryan’s face sharpens. He’s beaming, so giddy with success that it’s making his body vibrate. Shane loves him so much he’s stupid with it; knows already that he’s going to go along with whatever Ryan suggests. He’s going to get on a plane and follow him into the jungle or the desert or the mountains, and when he’s told not to touch artifacts, he won’t, even though he’s not convinced they have the power to hurt him.

“What did you find?” he asks, indulgent.

Ryan grins. “The old texts don’t say exactly what’s inside,” he says, voice pitched low, already slipping into his teacher voice. “But locals call it the _temple of doom._ ”

**Author's Note:**

> SHANE: [sees ryan in his indiana jones getup & is stunned speechless]
> 
> ME: lmao same


End file.
